A one-time-pad-like chaotic image encryption scheme using data steganography

One-time-pad-like image ciphers using chaos and hash functions have achieved outstanding performance in terms of security strength and efficiency, but they fail to consider the problem of hash value distribution, limiting their practical application significantly. Moreover, most existing algorithms are designed based on independent permutation and sequential diffusion operations, which may lead them to end up being broken by chosen-plaintext attacks. In this paper, we propose a one-time-pad-like chaotic image cipher using data steganography. The whole scheme consists of an encryption process for the plain-image and an embedding process for the encrypted image. Different from the permutation-diffusion type image ciphers, we remove the permutation stage and use only a plaintext-dependent non-sequential diffusion operation. The encryption algorithm exploits the security potential of the encryption order and can achieve a satisfactory level of security with only once scanning of the entire image. During the embedding process, a reversible data-hiding technique is adopted to embed the hash value of the plain-image into the cipher-image so that it can be transmitted together to the receiver, overcoming the practical limitation encountered by the existing one-time-pad-like ciphers. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm is secure against all common attacks and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both security and efficiency.