A Multilayer Nonlinear Permutation Framework and Its Demonstration in Lightweight Image Encryption

As information systems become more widespread, data security becomes increasingly important. While traditional encryption methods provide effective protection against unauthorized access, they often struggle with multimedia data like images and videos. This necessitates specialized image encryption approaches. With the rise of mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, lightweight image encryption algorithms are crucial for resource-constrained environments. These algorithms have applications in various domains, including medical imaging and surveillance systems. However, the biggest challenge of lightweight algorithms is balancing strong security with limited hardware resources. This work introduces a novel nonlinear matrix permutation approach applicable to both confusion and diffusion phases in lightweight image encryption. The proposed method utilizes three different chaotic maps in harmony, namely a 2D Zaslavsky map, 1D Chebyshev map, and 1D logistic map, to generate number sequences for permutation and diffusion. Evaluation using various metrics confirms the method’s efficiency and its potential as a robust encryption framework. The proposed scheme was tested with 14 color images in the SIPI dataset. This approach achieves high performance by processing each image in just one iteration. The developed scheme offers a significant advantage over its alternatives, with an average NPCR of 99.6122, UACI of 33.4690, and information entropy of 7.9993 for 14 test images, with an average correlation value as low as 0.0006 and a vast key space of 2800. The evaluation results demonstrated that the proposed approach is a viable and effective alternative for lightweight image encryption.