IECA: an efficient IoT friendly image encryption technique using programmable cellular automata

Digital images play a vital role in multimedia communications in the modern era. With the advent of internet-of-things (IoT) applications, multimedia transfers are happening at a rapid pace. However, providing security to these data is essential if the data is sensitive. It is a challenging task in case of IoT applications due to the limitations of the sensors in terms of memory and computational efficiency. Therefore, conventional ciphers cannot be applied in the IoT devices. However, cellular automata (CA) can be used in this resource-constrained environment for providing security to the IoT devices, as it is inherently capable of creating complex patterns and pseudo-random sequences. It is also easy to implement in hardware. In this work, an IoT friendly programmable cellular automata (PCA) based block cipher called IECA is proposed. Further, randomness in the generated cipher-image has been tested using various statistical testings present in NIST test suite and DIEHARD test suite. The test results show that IECA  generates high degree of randomness in the produced cipher-image. In addition to this, correlation, entropy and differential analysis of the proposed scheme justifies the robustness against different types of attacks. Experimental results show the efficiency of IECA as compared to the existing block ciphers.