Chaos-based cryptography: a brief overview

Over the past decade, there has been tremendous interest in studying the behavior of chaotic systems. They are characterized by sensitive dependence on initial conditions, similarity to random behavior, and continuous broad-band power spectrum. Chaos has potential applications in several functional blocks of a digital communication system: compression, encryption and modulation. The possibility for self-synchronization of chaotic oscillations has sparked an avalanche of works on application of chaos in cryptography. In this paper, chaos-based cryptography is discussed from a point of view which the author believes is closer to the spirit of both cryptography and chaos theory than the way the subject has been treated recently by many researchers.