Image encryption method based on Elementary Cellular Automata

This paper presents a new image encryption/decryption system. The behavior of a number of elementary cellular automata of length 8 with periodic boundary conditions is investigated. It is found in the state-transition diagram that certain ECA rules result in some state attractors which satisfying basic requirement of the encryption scheme can perform encrypting function to transform the pixel values. The generation of these attractors depending only on the initial global state of the CA, without any additional hardware cost for the implementation, and requiring minimized computational resources. Simulation results on some gray level images show that the proposed image encryption method satisfies the properties of confusion and diffusion, and has perfect information concealing and a large number of secret key.