Lightweight IOT-friendly image encryption scheme based on Latin square and dynamic DNA coding

The fast growth of Internet of Things (IoTs) devices calls for the demand to accomplish an efficient and lightweight image encryption. Also, protecting the privacy of sensitive visual information on devices with limited resources presents significant challenges. Existing techniques and methods are not able to provide both powerful security and low computational requirements. Therefore, we propose an innovative encrypting scheme that combines three methods (Latin squares, dynamic DNA sequencing, and chaotic systems). This architecture is designed for the IoT environments where it is important that transactions are made both efficient and secure. Additionally, our approach offers strong security assurances and suitable for the constraints of edge devices. The performance evaluations of the proposed technique against modern encryption algorithms display a promising result. Our proposal demonstrates almost perfect randomness. It achieved an image entropy of (7.9994) and a minimal correlation of (-0.00472). The proposed system also demonstrated its high ability to resilience the differential attacks, with NPCR and UACI of (98.671) and (34.098), respectively. Also, the keyspace of the proposed method is ( ), that providing a robust defense against brute-force attacks. Despite this high security level, the technique maintains practical performance, encrypting a (512×512) image in (1.4026) seconds. These outcomes confirm the algorithm's effectiveness for protecting sensitive images in IoT applications, offering both security and suitable efficiency for real-world use.