Proposal and Analysis of a New Image Encryption Algorithm

Ensuring information security is a necessity in cyberspace. A lot of information is available online in a visual form so, if an image must be kept private, it needs to be encrypted. But usually any image processing algorithm requires many computing resources and time, especially if the image has a high-definition. Therefore, an image encryption algorithm has to be designed differently than those used to encrypt general data. We propose an image encryption algorithm that combines all known encryption techniques (permutation, substitution and key addition), that has very good performances in comparison of traditional encryption standards and it is also fast, simple and easy to implement. The proposed algorithm, so-called Light Encryption Algorithm (LEA), is applied on standard test images and some performance metrics are computed in order to analyze its performances and to compare them to those of other well-known encryption techniques.