Hardware realization of a lightweight 2D cellular automata-based cipher for image encryption

Cryptography is one of the fundamental techniques used to secure data storage and transmission of sensitive multimedia data exchanged between different communicating parties. Several mobile and embedded devices are equipped with high resolution digital cameras and resources for multimedia management but most of them lack mechanisms to protect image content due to the additional computational cost of cryptographic algorithms and the inherent power constraints in such resource-limited devices. In this paper, a two-dimensional (2D) cellular automata (CA) based stream cipher for color image encryption is presented. A CA is used to generate a good quality pseudorandom bit sequence that is used in a stream cipher scheme for color image encryption that outperforms related works. The proposed scheme, prototyped into a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device, allows image encryption with reduced hardware resource utilization suitable to be embedded as a low-power component in mobile computing systems.