Evolutionary-based image encryption using biomolecules operators and non-coupled map lattice

Information security is one of the important defensive issues in coping with attacks to valuable information of organizations. Image encryption is one of the passive defense tools to provide the information and communication security. In this paper, a chaotic evolutionary biomolecules operators model (CEBOM) was presented for image encryption. The proposed model consisted of three steps. In the first step, a secret key was considered for the initial value of the non-coupled map lattice function using the SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm)-256 algorithm. In the next step (permutation), the optimization process was performed using the tabu search algorithm (TSA) operators and the chaos function for the image with the least correlation, then the operators of the DNA sequence and chaos function were applied to the diffusion operation. The results were indicative of the superiority of the proposed model over other models. In addition, the proposed model was highly robust to common attacks, with the entropy value obtained as 7.9994.