An Effective Composite Cryptosystem for Securing Digital Images Using Genetic-RSA-DNA Algorithms

Image communication in unsafe networks like the Internet is becoming widespread for its important applications in military, medicine, and entertainment. Such insecure channels impose real challenges in protecting the security and privacy of transmitted multimedia contents such as images. Many approaches have been proposed in the literature to overcome these challenges; however, each one of these methods has its limitations. The best way to reap the benefits of these approaches is to integrate them into a single approach to remove some or all of their limitations. Hence, in this research, a new integrated approach is proposed to secure images transmitted through insecure communication channels. It is composed of integrating a genetic algorithm, DNA cryptography, and the RSA algorithm in the form of successive security layers. First, the original image and the generated 256-bit hash values are encoded via DNA complementary rules to obtain the coded DNA sequences. Second, the resultant two encoded chains are summed by performing a DNA XOR process to get the scrambled DNA image. Third, the scrambled image is decoded to gain the ciphered image. Fourth, the genetic technique is applied to the cipher image from the prior level to get the ciphered image from the second encryption layer. Finally, the RSA algorithm is employed on the cipher image from the last step to earn the final encrypted image. The experimental results and statistical tests prove the viability and ability of the proposed approach to secure images against several known attacks and overcome the limitations of single-algorithm security approaches. To sum up, this approach can be utilized for secure image transmission in real-time telecommunication systems.