Lightweight Encryption for Images

Advancements in multimedia commerce resulted in rapid growth in the amount of multimedia data transferred over network. The multimedia data stored on the Web servers as well as the data transferred over the network needs to be protected from piracy and eavesdropping. Hence there is a strong need for encrypting the multimedia content. But owing to the size of the multimedia content, and real time requirements for encoding, transmitting and decoding the multimedia content, usage of standard encryption/decryption schemes prove to be an overhead. Hence lightweight encryption schemes are gaining popularity. The schemes are based on using the structure of the multimedia content, and partially encrypting the content such that it results in insertion of sufficient noise to make the content unintelligible. In this paper we present a scalable lightweight encryption scheme that can be used for encrypting/decrypting image and video, and it uses a simple protocol to identify the portion of the content that has been encrypted.