Exploring the Future of File Security: A Novel Chaos-Based Bytestream Encryption

Typically, chaos-based encryption applications are concerned with encrypting a single type of data, such as an image, text, or sound. Hence, often an encryption approach is restricted to that type of data. This paper explores the aforementioned problem and proposes a novel chaos-based encryption, which encrypts a file’s bytestream directly, rather than its content. A novel one-dimensional chaotic map is introduced and investigated, revealing regions of constant chaos with high Lyapunov exponents. Based on the novel chaotic map, a pseudorandom bit generator is developed that passes the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) statistical tests. This PRBG is used in the bytestream encryption problem by combining a permutation with an exclusive OR operation. To demonstrate the resilience of this bytestream encryption system, many tests are employed, including entropy, correlation, key space and histogram analysis, differential attack analysis, mean absolute error, and mean squared error. The algorithm is successfully tested on .png, .docx, .pdf, .mp3, .stl files.