Copyright © 2012 Khaled Loukhaoukha et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

In the past few years, several encryption algorithms based on chaotic systems have been proposed as means to protect digital images against cryptographic attacks. These encryption algorithms typically use relatively small key spaces and thus offer limited security, especially if they are one-dimensional. In this paper, we proposed a novel image encryption algorithm based on Rubik's cube principle. The original image is scrambled using the principle of Rubik's cube. Then, XOR operator is applied to rows and columns of the scrambled image using two secret keys. Finally, the experimental results and security analysis show that the proposed image encryption scheme not only can achieve good encryption and perfect hiding ability but also can resist exhaustive attack, statistical attack, and differential attack.