Known-plaintext attack and ciphertext-only attack for encrypted single-pixel imaging

TL;DR

This paper introduces cryptanalysis methods, including known-plaintext and ciphertext-only attacks, to break encrypted single-pixel imaging systems, revealing vulnerabilities and enabling key recovery without prior access to the key.

Contribution

It is the first to analyze and demonstrate effective cryptanalysis techniques against encrypted single-pixel imaging systems, exposing security weaknesses.

Findings

Both attacks successfully recover the encryption key.

The ciphertext-only attack exploits statistical features of intensity values.

The known-plaintext attack swaps roles of patterns and images.

Abstract

In many previous works, a single-pixel imaging (SPI) system is constructed as an optical image encryption system. Unauthorized users are not able to reconstruct the plaintext image from the ciphertext intensity sequence without knowing the illumination pattern key. However, little cryptanalysis about encrypted SPI has been investigated in the past. In this work, we propose a known-plaintext attack scheme and a ciphertext-only attack scheme to an encrypted SPI system for the first time. The known-plaintext attack is implemented by interchanging the roles of illumination patterns and object images in the SPI model. The ciphertext-only attack is implemented based on the statistical features of single-pixel intensity values. The two schemes can crack encrypted SPI systems and successfully recover the key containing correct illumination patterns.