A Color Image Encryption Scheme Using an Enhanced One-Dimensional Chaotic Map and Adaptive DNA Encoding

Secure transmission and storage of color images remain challenging tasks due to strong inter-pixel correlations and high data volume. This work proposes a one-dimensional sine-tent-logistic-exponential map (STLEM) equipped with numerical boundary correction rules to mitigate finite-precision numerical degradation so as to enhance the unpredictability of chaos-driven cryptosystems. We benchmark STLEM against classic logistic, tent, and sine maps via Lyapunov exponents, autocorrelation, approximate entropy, permutation entropy, Lempel-Ziv complexity, and Kolmogorov–Sinai entropy. Bifurcation diagrams, the 0–1 test, and NIST statistical tests are further adopted to characterize its chaotic dynamics and randomness. Comparative results verify that STLEM achieves improved dynamical complexity and randomness performance. Built upon the proposed STLEM, this paper constructs a color-image encryption scheme that employs a 256-bit master key and two groups of chaotic parameters to produce key-related chaotic sequences. The cryptosystem integrates dynamic edge expansion, chaotic permutation, position-dependent adaptive DNA encoding, DNA-domain chained diffusion, and two successive row-column permutation phases. HMAC-SHA-256 is utilized to generate plaintext-aware initial conditions and perform ciphertext authentication prior to decryption. Experimental validations demonstrate complete plaintext recovery under valid secret inputs, while authentication rejects invalid keys and tampered ciphertexts. Ciphered images exhibit high information entropy, negligible adjacent-pixel correlations, and satisfactory number of pixel change rate (NPCR) and unified average changing intensity (UACI) metrics. Benefiting from a sufficiently large key space and O(MNlog(MN)) computational complexity, the proposed scheme is resilient against brute-force attacks and well suited for secure color-image communication scenarios, rather than acting as a general-purpose replacement for standard block ciphers.