BRCA-HM: A lightweight image encryption scheme using bit reversal, cellular automata, and Henon map in IoT application

In this paper, the proposed method is BRCA-HM, a lightweight image encryption scheme that combines Bit Reversal, Cellular Automata, and the Henon map. The proposed scheme provides an efficient and robust encryption framework. In this work, we use Bit Reversal to improve diffusion, employ Cellular Automata Rule 90 for random-like transformation, and apply the Henon Map to introduce chaotic behaviour, thereby achieving high unpredictability and strong resistance to attacks. The proposed method demonstrates the validity of the proposed scheme through experimental results, where the information entropy is calculated as 7.9990, UACI is equal to 33.46%, and NPCR is equal to 99.68%, thereby proving the strong security properties of the proposed scheme, which is resistant to differential attacks. As a lightweight solution, BRCA-HM is attractive to data-hungry environments, such as IoT and those requiring borderline real-time multimedia. In the future, computational efficiency is expected to improve, and a multilayer encryption model will be extended to enhance the scheme’s stability. The proposed method opened up a potential approach for secure and efficient image encryption in modern digital communication systems. The findings highlight the potential for this hybrid approach to provide a safe, efficient, and durable solution for image encryption in IoT applications, maintaining data integrity and privacy while outperforming existing encryption techniques. The experimental results and comparison with state-of-the-art approaches indicate that the proposed scheme offers a high level of robustness against various unsafe attacks.