A Lightweight Image Cryptography Approach via Invertible Transformation

Image security is a critical issue in the recent era of multimedia applications. Mostly, there has been an exponential growth in image data communication among various parties. Due to exchange of confidential image data via communication channels, the attackers may intercept the communication channel that led to serious security breaches. In this manner, the confidential data in the digital images may be illegally misused by the unauthorized adversaries. To counter these attacks, one of the viable solutions is to apply image cryptography algorithms for secure communication between sender and receiver. The existing image cryptography methods exhibit a trade-off between security and performance. In this paper, we expound a lightweight image cryptography algorithm for the encryption of digital images. Our approach makes use of simple linear bitwise operator along with various encryption keys that is shared between sender and receiver. The proposed approach is efficient in terms of complexity and highly secure to send data among different users. The method exhibits a, mean square error (MSE) of 13218.83, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 7.364 and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 16.864 respectively.