Securing sensitive visual data, such as medical images, classified surveillance or reconnaissance data, and personal multimedia, requires specialized encryption systems in the age of pervasive digital communication and cloud computing environments. Digital images exhibit high redundancy (repetitive information) and significant spatial correlations (where neighboring pixels have similar values), rendering typical encryption methods less effective. Traditional encryption methods, such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), are becoming less effective as cloud computing continues to evolve. This study introduces a new image encryption system that blends feedback DNA cryptography, which uses DNA encoding for secure data transfer, with AES and a hybrid sine-skew tent map to enhance security. DNA cryptography is a novel approach that helps protect data during transmission and storage. Here, a 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) key serves as the AES key. We investigated the performance and security metrics of the proposed framework. The results show that the ciphertext achieves a Shannon entropy of ≈ 8.0, an exceptionally low pixel correlation (almost zero in all directions), and an exceptional average differential attack resistance (NPCR ≈ 99.6072%, UACI ≈ 33.4467%), outperforming other existing techniques.
Khan et al. (Tue,) studied this question.