LICCA: a lightweight image cipher using 3-D cellular automata

The rapid rise of Internet of Technology (IoT) applications in the twenty-first century is characterized by the frequent transmission of sensitive multimedia data. Such transmissions are vulnerable to security threats, putting the data at risk. Handling security aspects becomes especially important when dealing with sensitive data exchanges. It should be emphasized, however, that sensor devices are resource constrained, limiting the use of standard ciphers at the device level. Because CA are easy to implement in hardware, give a huge key space, and can generate extremely random sequences computationally faster, they can be utilized to create lightweight ciphers for data confidentiality. In this paper, a color image cipher based on 3-D von Neumann CA is proposed for IoT applications. It has succeeded in achieving significantly faster execution speeds, lower energy consumption, and a bigger key space than previous methods. The cipher images also exhibit a consistently distributed histogram and correlation coefficient map, high information entropy values, and passed the NIST and DIEHARD randomness tests. Furthermore, the LICCA’s efficacy against cyber-attacks has been demonstrated by numerous standard cryptanalysis attacks and other critical studies. Its suitability for IoT applications has been verified by experimental results.