Abstract
Modern multimedia communications technology requirements have raised security standards, which allows for enormous development in security standards. This article presents an innovative symmetric cryptosystem that depends on the hybrid chaotic Lorenz diffusion stage and DNA confusion stage. It involves two identical encryption and decryption algorithms, which simplifies the implementation of transmitting and receiving schemes of images securely as a bijective system. Both schemes utilize two distinctive non-consecutive chaotic diffusion stages and one DNA scrambling stage in between. The generation of the coded secret bit stream employs a hybrid chaotic system, which is employed to encrypt or decrypt the transmitted image and is utilized in the diffusion process to dissipate the redundancy in the original transmitted image statistics. The transmitted image is divided into eight scrambled matrices according to the position of the pixel in every splitting matrix. Each binary matrix is converted using a different conversion rule in the Watson-Crick rules. The DNA confusion stage is applied to increase the complexity of the correlation between the transmitted image and the utilized key. These stages allow the proposed image encryption scheme to be more robust against chosen/known plaintext attacks, differential attacks, cipher image attacks, and information entropy. The system was revealed to be more sensitive against minimal change in the generated secret key. The analysis proves that the system has superior statistical properties, bulkier key space, better plain text sensitivity, and improved key sensitivity compared with former schemes.