Abstract
The rapid growth of multimedia communication systems has expanded the High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) security applications precipitously. Therefore, there is an urgent, elevated need to protect and secure the HEVC content during streaming and communication over insecure channels to ensure the privacy of HEVC data against intruders and attackers. This paper introduces an optical HEVC cipher algorithm based on bit-plane 3D-JST (Three-Dimensional Jigsaw Transform) and multistage 2D-FrFT (Two-Dimensional Fractional Fourier Transform) encryption. The main advantage of employing 3D-JST is its unitary transform that has an inverse transform used to reorganize the HEVC frame-blocks in an indiscriminately way. The proposed algorithm embraces the cascaded 2D-FrFT encryption in the optical domain using a single arbitrary phase code; to be executed all optically with a lone lens. The suggested algorithm utilizes the two 2D-FrFT stages with distinct kernels in mutually dimensions separated by employing the arbitrary phase code. A foregoing bit-plane permutation stage is conducted on the input HEVC frames before the 3D-JST and 2D-FrFT processes to accomplish a high robustness and security level. To validate the efficacy of the proposed cryptography algorithm for secure HEVC streaming, a comprehensive evaluation framework has been introduced and followed to (a) test HEVC streams against different statistical cryptographic metrics, (b) compare the proposed algorithm with recent related works whether optical-based or digital-based algorithms and (c) study the impact of different security attacks on its performance. The evaluation results show a secure and efficient proposed cryptography algorithm that outperforms the conventional and related cryptography algorithms in terms of all examined evaluation metrics.