SPRING: a novel parallel chaos-based image encryption scheme

Due to the increasing demand on secure image transmission, image encryption has emerged as an active research field in recent years. Many of the proposed image encryption schemes are designed based on chaotic maps with permutation–diffusion architecture. While most of these schemes reported good statistical properties, they are slow in execution speed due to inherent data dependency of the proposed schemes. Some of these schemes are designed based on complex chaotic systems that require significant computational resources to obtain the keystream for encryption. In this paper, we propose SPRING, a novel image encryption scheme designed based on lightweight chaotic maps and simple logical and arithmetic operations, which is also highly optimized for massively parallel architecture (e.g. GPU). The extensive experimental results show that SPRING is not only secure but also able to achieve high encryption speed in single-core CPU, multi-core CPU and many-core GPU. Encrypting a 512 × 512 grayscale image in serial takes 0.9126 ms which is 220% faster than state-of-the-art ARX-based image encryption scheme proposed by Choi et al. SPRING can be implemented in parallel to encrypt the same image in 0.0862 ms by exploiting many-core GPU, which is 10× faster than the serial version implemented using CPU.