Image Encryption and Decryption in A Modification of ElGamal Cryptosystem in MATLAB

TL;DR

This paper presents a MATLAB-based modification of the ElGamal cryptosystem tailored for encrypting and decrypting gray and color images, enhancing security by leveraging the discrete logarithm problem.

Contribution

It introduces a novel modification of the ElGamal cryptosystem specifically designed for image encryption and decryption in MATLAB, improving security and efficiency.

Findings

Encrypted images become completely unrecognizable

Decryption accurately restores original images

Encryption process is smooth and secure

Abstract

The need of exchanging messages and images secretly over unsecure networks promoted the creation of cryptosystems to enable receivers to interpret the exchanged information. In this paper, a particular public key cryptosystem called the ElGamal Cryptosystem is presented considered with the help MATLAB Program to be used over Images. Since the ElGamal cryptosystem over a primitive root of a large prime is used in messages encryption in the free GNU Privacy Guard software, recent versions of PGP, and other cryptosystems. This paper shows a modification of the this cryptosystem by applying it over gray and color images. That would be by transforming an image into its corresponding matrix using MATLAB Program, then applying the encryption and decryption algorithms over it. Actually, this modification gives one of the best image encryptions that have been used since the encryption procedure over any image goes smoothly and transfers the original image to completely undefined image which makes this cryptosystem is really secure and successful over image encryption. As well as, the decryption procedure of the encrypted image works very well since it transfers undefined image to its original. Therefore, this new modification can make the cryptosystem of images more immune against some future attacks since breaking this cryptosystem depends on solving the discrete logarithm problem which is really impossible with large prime numbers .