Abstract
A new four-dimensional chaotic system with four cross-terms is investigated in this study. The dynamical behaviors of the system and codimension-one bifurcations are analyzed both theoretically and numerically. The influences of the system’s parameters on its nonlinear dynamics are explored. Then, a proposed four-dimensional blinking system is introduced based on the new chaotic system. More interestingly, the possible occurrence of ghost attractors in the phase space of the blinking system is verified and has been illustrated through several examples. The encryption keystream was generated dynamically using pre-treated chaotic mixed sequences and was used to mask the voice bitstream to protect voice data integrity. Finally, a voice encryption example employing the 4-D blinking chaotic system of the proposed system is presented.