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Cryptanalysis of S-box-only chaotic image ciphers against chosen plaintext attack

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Abstract

S-boxes have been widely used as a base of new encryption strategies. Recently, the utilization of S-box becomes popular in image ciphers as a main approach to performing substitution. Based on a general model of S-box-only image ciphers, this paper performs a cryptanalysis on the performance of these kinds of ciphers against chosen plaintext attack. The cryptanalytic findings have been concluded that not only S-box-only image ciphers are practically insecure against chosen plaintext attack, but also the computational complexity of the attack is only O(128L), where L is the total number of pixels with respect to the image. Moreover, a real S-box-only chaotic image cipher is tested as an example analysis to demonstrate our assertion. Finally, we give four corresponding improvement ideas that help to design a secure cryptosystem based on S-boxes.

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Acknowledgements

The work was funded by the Natural Science Foundation Project of CQ CSTC (Grant No. 2011jjjq40001), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61070246, 61103211), and the Graduate Innovation Foundation of Chongqing University (Grant No. CDJXS12180009).

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Correspondence to Di Xiao.

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Zhang, Y., Xiao, D. Cryptanalysis of S-box-only chaotic image ciphers against chosen plaintext attack. Nonlinear Dyn 72, 751–756 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11071-013-0750-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11071-013-0750-x

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