Known-plaintext attack and ciphertext-only attack for encrypted single-pixel imaging
This work addresses a security vulnerability in optical image encryption for unauthorized users, representing a novel cryptanalysis contribution rather than an incremental improvement.
The authors tackled the security of encrypted single-pixel imaging systems by proposing known-plaintext and ciphertext-only attack schemes, which successfully recover the illumination pattern key used for encryption.
In many previous works, a single-pixel imaging (SPI) system is constructed as an optical image encryption system. Unauthorized users are not able to reconstruct the plaintext image from the ciphertext intensity sequence without knowing the illumination pattern key. However, little cryptanalysis about encrypted SPI has been investigated in the past. In this work, we propose a known-plaintext attack scheme and a ciphertext-only attack scheme to an encrypted SPI system for the first time. The known-plaintext attack is implemented by interchanging the roles of illumination patterns and object images in the SPI model. The ciphertext-only attack is implemented based on the statistical features of single-pixel intensity values. The two schemes can crack encrypted SPI systems and successfully recover the key containing correct illumination patterns.