Lei Chen

Lei Chen, Chengqing Li, Chao Li

To encrypt sensitive information existing in a color DICOM images, a medical privacy protection scheme (called as MPPS) based on chaos and DNA coding was proposed by using two coupled chaotic systems to produce cryptographic primitives. Relying on some empirical analyses and experimental results, the designers of MPPS claimed that it can withstand a chosen-plaintext attack and some other classic attacking models. However, this statement is groundless. In this paper, we investigate the essential properties of MPPS and DNA coding, and we then propose an efficient chosen-plaintext attack to disclose its equivalent secret-key. The attack only needs $\lceil \log_{256}(3\cdot M\cdot N)\rceil+4$ pair of chosen plain-images and the corresponding cipher-images, where $M \times N$ and ``3" are the size of the RGB color image and the number of color channels, respectively. In addition, the other claimed superiorities are questioned from the perspective of modern cryptography. Both theoretical and experimental results are presented to support the efficiency of the proposed attack and the other reported security faults. The proposed cryptanalysis results will promote the proper application of DNA encoding to protect multimedia privacy data, especially that in a DICOM image.

Junxin Chen, Lei Chen, Yicong Zhou

During the past decades, there is a great popularity employing nonlinear dynamics and permutation-substitution architecture for image encryption. There are three primary procedures in such encryption schemes, the key schedule module for producing encryption factors, permutation for image scrambling and substitution for pixel modification. Under the assumption of chosen-ciphertext attack, we evaluate the security of a class of image ciphers which adopts pixel-level permutation and modular addition for substitution. It is mathematically revealed that the mapping from differentials of ciphertexts to those of plaintexts are linear and has nothing to do with the key schedules, permutation techniques and encryption rounds. Moreover, a universal chosen-ciphertext attack is proposed and validated. Experimental results demonstrate that the plaintexts can be directly reconstructed without any security key or encryption elements. Related cryptographic discussions are also given.

Lei Chen, Shihong Wang

This paper investigates a secure blind watermarking scheme. The main idea of the scheme not only protects the watermark information but also the embedding positions. To achieve a higher level of security, we propose a sub key generation mechanism based on the singular value decomposition and hash function, where sub keys depend on both the main key and the feature codes of the original image. The different sub keys ensure that the embedding positions are randomly selected for different original images. Watermark is embedded in the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients of the scrambled original image. Simulation results show that such embedded method resolves well the contradiction of imperceptibility and robustness. Based on good correlation properties of chaotic sequences, we design a detection method, which can accurately compute geometric transformation (rotation and translation transformations) parameters. The security analysis, including key space analysis, key sensitivity analysis, cryptanalysis, and the comparison results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking scheme also achieves high security.