Edinburgh Napier University

  Visual selective image encryption can both improve the efficiency of the image encryption algorithm and reduce the frequency and severity of attacks against data. In this article, a new form of encryption is proposed based on keys derived from Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) and plaintext image. The proposed scheme results in chaotic visual selective encryption of image data. In order to make and ensure that this new scheme is robust and secure against various kinds of attacks, the initial conditions of the chaotic maps utilized are generated from a random DNA sequence as well as plaintext image via an SHA-512 hash function. To increase the key space, three different single dimension chaotic maps are used. In the proposed scheme, these maps introduce diffusion in a plain image by selecting a block that have greater correlation and then it is bitwise XORed with the random matrix. The other two chaotic maps break the correlation among adjacent pixels via confusion (row and column shuffling). Once the ciphertext image has been divided into the respective units of Most Significant Bits (MSBs) and Least Significant Bit (LSBs), the host image is passed through lifting wavelet transformation, which replaces the low-frequency blocks of the host image (i.e., HL and HH) with the aforementioned MSBs and LSBs of ciphertext. This produces a final visual selective encrypted image and all security measures proves the robustness of the proposed scheme.