Abstract
•Cryptanalyzing the Chen et al. scheme to demonstrate its security weaknesses.•Developing an attack model to break the security of Chen et al. cipher.•Proposing a modified version of Chen et al. scheme to remedy its security weakness.•The proposed scheme can resist several attacks such as known/chosen plain-image attack.•Results assure the effectiveness of the proposed image encryption scheme.
This paper proposes an attack model to break the security of an image cipher entitled with “Reusing the permutation matrix dynamically for efficient image cryptographic algorithm” developed by Chen et al. The attack model uses only two chosen plain–images to recover any image of size 256 × 256 while it requires four chosen plain-images to reveal images of larger sizes. The paper also suggests an image cryptosystem to overcome the security inadequacies of the scheme under study. The proposed scheme utilizes multi-chaotic systems and a self-generation mechanism to scramble and diffuse a plain-image based on both the secret key and specific features of the plain-image. This promotes the security level of the proposed cipher as illustrated by the conducted security analysis and experimental results.