Biomedical Image Encryption with a Novel Memristive Chua Oscillator Embedded in a Microcontroller

In this paper, a chaos-based encryption/decryption scheme using a novel memristive Chua oscillator to protect medical images is presented. The novel Chua oscillator is constructed by using the active voltage memristor in the nonlinear branch of the Chua oscillator. The chaotic dynamics behaviors are investigated using 1-D, 2-D bifurcation diagrams, time traces, basin of attractions, and largest Lyapunov exponent plot. The study reveals that the novel memristive Chua oscillator exhibits versatile transitions to chaos with interesting dynamics like multistability, spiking, and bursting oscillations just to name a few. These remarkable features are experimentally confirmed by a laboratory microcontroller-based setup. Thereafter, a chaos-based cryptography algorithm designed for biomedical images is built using pseudorandom number generated from the oscillator. The robustness and security tests undergone by the algorithm yielded high sensitivity on the encryption keys and resisted noise contamination as well as data loss. These results are encouraging and prove that the chaos-based cryptosystem built with the memristive Chua circuit–generated pseudorandom number is suitable for securing images in a healthcare system.