Grayscale Image Encryption Based on

High-Dimensional Fractional Order

Chua’s System

Tanmoy Dasgupta, Pritam Paral, and Samar Bhattacharya

Department of Electrical Engineering,

Jadavpur University, Kolkata - 700032, India
{tdg.nexttonewton,callinpritam}@gmail.com,
samar bhattacharya@ee.jdvu.ac.in

Abstract. This paper proposes a new image encryption algorithm that

makes the use of high dimensional fractional order Chua’s chaotic sys-
tem. Fractional order extension of the Chua’s system gives a much larger
key-space than its original integer order version. The proposed image en-
cryption algorithm uses a simple but excellent technique which is quite
fast and the encrypted images are found to have very high entropy. The
algorithm is shown to be highly robust and almost invulnerable to sta-
tistical attacks. Moreover, the algorithm is designed in such a way that
it can be extended by incorporating other chaotic systems as well.

Keywords: Chaos, fractional order system, image encryption.

1 Introduction

The application of chaotic systems in image encryption was first proposed by

Matthews [1]. Since then different methods of image encryption based on chaotic
ciphers are developed and some of them are quite popular. Most of the methods
[2–4] first employ a pixel scrambling method based on some chaotic wavelet to
jumble the pixel positions. Then a standard chaotic system is used to change
the intensity levels of the pixels in the image.
In this paper, the proposed image encryption method makes use of fractional
order chaotic system. Memristor-based four-dimensional fractional order Chua’s
system [5] is used for this purpose. Since the response of chaotic systems are
heavily dependent on the initial conditions, integer order chaotic systems based
image encryption methods already have a very large key space. The key space
further increases if the fractional order extensions of the chaotic systems are
considered, as the order of differentiation can be varied along with the initial
conditions. Moreover, some modifications over the conventional methods are
shown in this paper to increase the key space further. However, the method that
is discussed in this paper does not employ any pixel-scrambling method. This
reduces the key space a little, but on the other hand, reduces the computation
time for the encryption of large image files.

M.K. Kundu et al. (eds.), Advanced Computing, Networking and Informatics - Volume 2, 317
Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies 28,
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-07350-7_35, c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
318 T. Dasgupta, P. Paral, and S. Bhattacharya

In the following sections, we first discuss the fundamentals of fractional order

memristor-based Chua’s system in brief, then the proposed image encryption
method is discussed in details.

2 Fractional Order Chua’s System

Fractional order Chua’s chaotic systems has a memristor-based piecewise non-

linear element and is described by (1) as follows

Dq1 x1 = α(x2 − x1 + x1 − W (x4 )x1 ) (1a)

Dq2 x2 = x1 − x2 + x3 (1b)

Dq3 x3 = −βx2 − γx3 (1c)

Dq4 x4 = x1 (1d)

The piecewise non-linearity W (x4 ) (produced by a memristor) is defined as


a , |x4 | < 1
W (x4 ) = (2)
b , |x4 | ≥ 1
and the fractional (q-th) order Riemann-Liouville (R-L) derivative [6] Dq f (t)
is defined as
 t
1
Dq f (t) = f (y)(t − y)−q−1 dy for q ∈ R− , (3)
Γ (−q) 0
along with the product rule of operators Dm Dn = Dm+n to compute (3) for
q ∈ R+ .
The values of the parameters are assumed to be α = 10, β = 13, γ = 0.1,
 = 1.5, a = 0.3, b = 0.8.
Now, consider the choice of the derivative orders
⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
q1 0.97
⎢ q2 ⎥ ⎢ 0.97 ⎥
q=⎢ ⎥ ⎢ ⎥
⎣ q3 ⎦ = ⎣ 0.97 ⎦ (4)
q4 0.97

and an initial condition

⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
x1 (0) 0.82267
⎢ x2 (0) ⎥ ⎢ 0.12501 ⎥
x0 = ⎢ ⎥ ⎢ ⎥
⎣ x3 (0) ⎦ = ⎣ 0.00796 ⎦ . (5)
x4 (0) 0.78956
The corresponding phase trajectories for a simulation time of 100s is shown
in Fig. 1(a) and Fig. 1(b).