An image encryption based on elementary cellular automata

This paper presents a new image encryption/decryption scheme. The behavior of a number of elementary cellular automata (ECA) of length 8 with periodic boundary conditions is investigated. It is found in the state-transition diagram that some ECA rules result in state attractors which satisfies basic requirement of the encryption scheme that can perform encrypting function to transform the pixel values. The generation of these attractors depending only on the rule and initial state of the CA, without any additional hardware cost for the implementation, and requires minimized computational resources. Simulation results on some grayscale and color images show that the proposed image encryption method satisfies the properties of confusion and diffusion, execution speed and has perfect information concealing. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.