Chosen-plaintext attack of an image encryption scheme based on modified permutation-diffusion structure

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a recently proposed image encryption scheme based on a modified permutation-diffusion structure is vulnerable to a chosen-plaintext attack, revealing security weaknesses in the design.

Contribution

It provides the first known cryptanalysis of the ICMPD scheme, showing how it can be efficiently compromised with a linear data complexity.

Findings

ICMPD can be broken by a chosen-plaintext attack

The attack complexity is linear relative to image size

The relationship between diffusion operations and cryptographic primitives is analyzed

Abstract

Since the first appearance in Fridrich's design, the usage of permutation-diffusion structure for designing digital image cryptosystem has been receiving increasing research attention in the field of chaos-based cryptography. Recently, a novel chaotic Image Cipher using one round Modified Permutation-Diffusion pattern (ICMPD) was proposed. Unlike traditional permutation-diffusion structure, the permutation is operated on bit level instead of pixel level and the diffusion is operated on masked pixels, which are obtained by carrying out the classical affine cipher, instead of plain pixels in ICMPD. Following a \textit{divide-and-conquer strategy}, this paper reports that ICMPD can be compromised by a chosen-plaintext attack efficiently and the involved data complexity is linear to the size of the plain-image. Moreover, the relationship between the cryptographic kernel at the diffusion stage of ICMPD and modulo addition then XORing is explored thoroughly.