Performance Evaluation of AES, ECC and Logistic Chaotic Map Algorithms in Image Encryption

Abstract

I n these days of technology, the usage of images has become increasingly high especially now that almost everyone has access to internet. Also, image helps us to learn, grabs our attention, explains complicated concepts as well as inspires us. Sharing these images is essential and therefore image encryption algorithms are proposed to secure the transmission of these image from many types of attacks such as Man-in-the-middle attack (MITM). In this paper, we proposed a hybrid security system that consist of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Advanced Encryption System (AES). Where ECC is used to generate private/public keys and AES is for encryption and decryption of the image using the ECC generated keys. The system works as follows; it begins by inserting the image to be encrypted which is “lena.png” of size 256*256 and passing it to AES Algorithm along with the generated public key. Then, in AES algorithm, the public key is hashed then used to encrypt the image with AES encryption algorithm. On the other hand, the decryption algorithm works as follows; inserting the encrypted image then calculating the decryption key to use it to decrypt the image using AES decryption algorithm. Finally, our experimental results shows that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) test shows that the ECC generated keys have better randomness than using only AES generated keys. Also, the encrypted image histogram show that the image pixels values are well distributed across all three channels R, G and B. This shows that the hybrid system is a step further to get a more secure image encryption system against attacks with the generated ECC keys. To get further, Logistic chaotic map has been used to encrypt images for comparison purposes with AES and ECC generated images in terms of randomness, security and histogram