Color Image Encryption Based on RNA Codons and Unimodular Maps

We now live in a technologically advanced society where the use of mobile phones, multimedia, and the internet has increased significantly due to the rapid advancement of these technologies. In order to secure these technologies, information security is vital, whether the data is at rest, in transit, or stored. To provide information security during transmission, cryptography plays an important role, and in the image encryption research area, chaotic system-based encryption techniques are vastly popular. In this paper, we have proposed a robust image encryption algorithm based on RiboNucleic Acid (RNA) codons and unimodular maps. The algorithm consists of an RNA-encoding phase preceded and followed by scrambling with unimodular maps. From the experimental results, it is seen that the proposed method scores 99% for the number of pixels change rate (NPCR). The information entropy (IE) is 7.999, which is very close to the ideal value of 8, and the correlation coefficient (CC) for each direction is close to zero. Experimental results also confirm that the proposed algorithm is resistant to statistical, differential, cropping, and noise attacks.