Open Access

ARTICLE

Chaos-Based Novel Watermarked Satellite Image Encryption Scheme

Mohamed Medani¹, Yahia Said², Nashwan Adnan Othman^3,4, Farrukh Yuldashev⁵, Mohamed Kchaou⁶, Faisal Khaled Aldawood⁶, Bacha Rehman^7,*

1 Applied College of Muhayil Aseer, King Khalid University, Abha, 62529, Saudi Arabia
2 Center for Scientific Research and Entrepreneurship, Northern Border University, Arar, 73213, Saudi Arabia
3 Department of Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, Knowledge University, Erbil, 44001, Iraq
4 Department of Computer Engineering, Al-Kitab University, Altun Kupri, 36001, Iraq
5 Department of Informatics and Its Teaching Methods, Tashkent State Pedagogical University, Tashkent, 100070, Uzbekistan
6 Department of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Bisha, Bisha, P.O. Box 001, Saudi Arabia
7 Department of Computer Science, Solent University, Southampton, SO14 0YN, UK

* Corresponding Author: Bacha Rehman. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Emerging Technologies in Information Security )

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2025, 143(1), 1049-1070. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2025.063405

Received 14 January 2025; Accepted 12 March 2025; Issue published 11 April 2025

Abstract

Satellite images are widely used for remote sensing and defence applications, however, they are subject to a variety of threats. To ensure the security and privacy of these images, they must be watermarked and encrypted before communication. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel watermarked satellite image encryption scheme based on chaos, Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) sequence, and hash algorithm. The watermark image, DNA sequence, and plaintext image are passed through the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-512) to compute the initial condition (keys) for the Tangent-Delay Ellipse Reflecting Cavity Map (TD-ERCS), Henon, and Duffing chaotic maps, respectively. Through bitwise XOR and substitution, the TD-ERCS map encrypts the watermark image. The ciphered watermark image is embedded in the plaintext image. The embedded plaintext image is permuted row-wise and column-wise using the Henon chaotic map. The permuted image is then bitwise XORed with the values obtained from the Duffing map. For additional security, the XORed image is substituted through a dynamic S-Box. To evaluate the efficiency and performance of the proposed algorithm, several tests are performed which prove its resistance to various types of attacks such as brute-force and statistical attacks.

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Keywords

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