Secure gray image sharing framework with adaptive key generation using image digest

In the constantly changing digital age where instant information sharing is shared globally, the content's safe delivery and privacy management have become necessary. Mainly, information in multimedia data becomes massive in networks, and sharing such data becomes vital and vulnerable. To mitigate the vulnerability in information sharing over public networks, it is crucial to develop privacy-preserving algorithms and system security schemes that ensure the safety, ownership and integrity of the information that travels through the network. The confusion and diffusion strategies are significant in enhancing the robustness of the encryption algorithms. This paper deals with ensuring the image's Confidentiality-Integrity-Authenticity (CIA triad) aspects using image encryption, integrity and authentication strategies. The proposed algorithm generates a one-way hash value based on pixel intensity, which acts as a digital fingerprint for the image to validate integrity failures. The hash value of the image is used as a diffusion key in the proposed image-specific encryption algorithm. Lorentz attractor generates a random index for confusion in the proposed encryption algorithm. The CIA triad system involves the deployment of a one-way "Authentication token" (Authtoken) generator that produces an image-specific token. The suggested system was examined using several CIA-related metrics, yielding an average entropy of 7.97871 and a correlation of 0.00337. Other metrics further demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework. Hence, the suggested security solution offers an absolute CIA triad while they are being transmitted.