On the reliability of computational chaos-based cryptography for information exchange

TL;DR

This paper examines the reliability of chaos-based cryptography for image encryption, revealing that device-specific computational differences can compromise security, and proposes a mitigation method.

Contribution

It identifies a fundamental flaw in chaos-based encryption due to floating-point discrepancies and offers a solution to improve its reliability.

Findings

Chaos-based encryption keys differ across devices due to computational inaccuracies.

Many chaos-based schemes are vulnerable because of device-specific arithmetic properties.

A mitigation method can reduce the impact of computational discrepancies on security.

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of dynamical chaotic systems to encrypt and exchange images between different devices. Two devices were used to simulate the Cubic Map, having the same set of initial conditions, to generate an encryption key. Although both devices are floating-point compliant, the simulations, and consequently the encryption key, turned out to differ from one another. This indicates that many existing chaos-based encryption schemes are just special cases of computational arithmetic properties, in which some characteristics in the construction of the devices coincided. A method to mitigate such flaw was also presented.