Title: Blockchain-based image encryption with spiral mapping and hashing techniques in dual level security scheme

Authors: P.L. Chithra; R. Aparna

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, University of Madras, Chennai, India ' Department of Data Science, M.O.P. Vaishnav College, Chennai, India

Abstract: As the technology is growing, the value of data is tremendously increasing. Different ways of security threats and hacking techniques are initiated by intruders to obtain the secret data. Image dataset holds huge information. Hence, it's crucial to safeguard the secret image data. In this paper, a blockchain-based strong encryption method combined with stegano to withstand security breaching is proposed. 2D image data segments are scrambled by random permutation and spiral mapped to obtain the cipher blocks. Each cipher blocks are chained by SHA-512 hash and embedded in covering audio signal to enhance protection. LSB encoding is adapted to maximise the correlation coefficient. Standard datasets for secret image and covering audio signal are used and the PSNR, SSIM, Correlation values are compared with existing methods to prove the efficacy of the proposed method. The ideology of applying blockchain technique in cryptography upholds the novelty of our work. Dual level security scheme (DLSS) strengthens the overall performance by sending the cipher blocks embedded within audio signals.

Keywords: blockchain; hash matrix; encryption; spiral mapping; dual level security scheme; DLSS; cipherblocks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICS.2023.131100

International Journal of Information and Computer Security, 2023 Vol.21 No.1/2, pp.185 - 204

Received: 20 May 2021
Accepted: 23 Dec 2021
Published online: 26 May 2023 *

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