A dynamic image encryption scheme through 2-D cellular automata and chaotic logistic map

Image encryption plays a vital role in protecting digital data from unauthorized access, cyber threats, and security breaches. With the continuous evolution of attack strategies, developing highly secure encryption mechanisms becomes essential. This paper presents a novel image encryption framework that integrates Cellular Automata (CA) with a chaotic map to enhance image confidentiality and integrity. The spatial complexity of 2-D CA strengthens the key generation process, ensuring a high degree of randomness in the key image. Subsequently, a 3-D coupled logistic map enhances chaotic behavior during encryption, increasing system complexity and security. To further ensure data integrity, Reed-Solomon codes are incorporated into both the key and the encrypted image, improving resilience against transmission errors. The proposed scheme undergoes rigorous evaluation through multiple analyses, achieving high entropy values nearing 7.9989, indicating enhanced encryption randomness. Additionally, it attains an average UACI of 36.9223 and an NPCR of 99.7887, demonstrating strong resistance against differential attacks. Furthermore, the model achieves an average MSE of 88.058 and a PSNR of 29.594 dB, ensuring high-quality image reconstruction. The encryption's robustness is further confirmed through the NIST randomness test suite, where the model achieves an average p-value of 0.6771 across 15 tests, validating the statistical randomness of the generated cipher images. Moreover, the scheme exhibits strong resilience against noise attacks, confirming its practical applicability in noisy transmission environments. Collectively, these results demonstrate the robustness, effectiveness, and superiority of the proposed image encryption framework.