Breaking an image encryption scheme based on Arnold map and Lucas series
This work exposes security flaws in a specific image encryption method, warning against its use for cryptographic purposes, but it is incremental as it critiques an existing scheme rather than proposing a new one.
The paper demonstrated that a recently proposed image encryption scheme based on Arnold map and Lucas series is vulnerable, showing its key space can be reduced significantly, making it breakable under brute force attacks and weak against chosen and known plaintext attacks.
Fairly recently, a novel image encryption based on Arnold scrambling and Lucas series has been proposed in the literature. The scheme design is based on permutation-substitution operations, where Arnold map is used to permute pixels for some T rounds, and Lucas sequence is used to mask the image and substitute pixel's values. The authors of the cryptosystem have claimed, after several statistical analyses, that their system is "with high efficiency" and resists chosen and known plaintext attacks. Negatively, in this paper we showed the opposite. The key space of the scheme under study could be reduced considerably after our equivalent keys analysis, and thus the system is breakable under reasonable brute force attack. After all, the design of the scheme has several weaknesses that make it weak against chosen and known plaintext attacks. Consequently, we do not recommend the use of this system for any cryptographic concern or security purpose.