Cryptanalysis and Improvement of the Image Encryption Scheme Based on Feistel Network and Dynamic DNA Encoding

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 9; pp. 145459 - 145470
• Main Authors: Feng, Wei, Qin, Zhentao, Zhang, Jing, Ahmad, Musheer
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Chosen-plaintext attack; Ciphers; cryptanalysis; Cryptography; Deoxyribonucleic acid; diffusion; DNA; DNA sequence operation; Encoding; Encryption; Image coding; image encryption; scrambling; Security management; STEM; substitution
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3123571

In order to improve the security and efficiency of image encryption, many researchers have continuously proposed new image encryption schemes in recent years. However, these image encryption schemes have not been fully analyzed and evaluated. In this paper, a newly reported image encryption scheme based on Feistel network and dynamic Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) encoding is deeply and comprehensively investigated. This encryption scheme mainly adopts four encryption steps to encrypt the plain image, which are Generation of chaotic sequences, Hill encryption, Feistel network, and Pixel diffusion. Our analyses show that there are some problems in the secret key design and encryption process of this encryption scheme. After pointing out and analyzing these problems, we have made several necessary improvements to this encryption scheme and proposed the corresponding chosen-plaintext attack algorithm. The subsequent simulation tests and analyses have confirmed the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed attack algorithm. Finally, for the problems in this encryption scheme and some current image encryption schemes, improvement suggestions are presented to provide references for the designers of future image encryption schemes.