A secure image permutation–substitution framework based on chaos and compressive sensing

Abstract

Existing secure image acquisition works based on compressive sensing, viewing compressive sensing–based imaging system as a symmetric cryptosystem, can only achieve asymptotic spherical security denoting that the ciphertext only leaks information about the energy of plaintext. Thereby, compressive sensing–based secure image acquisition systems usually work in some scenarios of friendly attack, such as brute-force attack for the entire key space and ciphertext-only attack for the complete plaintext. In this article, a novel permutation–confusion strategy using chaos and compressive sensing is put forward to protect the privacy-crucial images from more threatening malicious attacks, including known-plaintext attack and chosen-plaintext attack. Security guarantee is provided by one-time random projection of compressive sensing, sample-level permutation, and bit-level substitution. It is noteworthy that double confidentiality is embedded in compressive sensing–based image acquisition process using the key-related measurement matrix and sparsifying basis and the randomicity is improved. Simulation experiments and security analyses suggest that the proposed framework can achieve a high-level security and the performance of image reconstruction can be distinctly improved.