Real-time implementation of a chaos based cryptosystem on low-cost hardware

To overcome the worse statistical proprieties of digital chaotic maps, this paper proposes a modified version of the Henon chaotic map using a cosine function. What is new in this proposal is that the cosine function replaces only the nonlinear part of the chaotic map which increases the chaotic proprieties compared to other proposals. On the other hand, adding a constant with a high value ( $$F > 10^4$$ ) to the new control parameter eliminates the small zones of stability that cannot be observed easily. The improved Henon map has been evaluated in terms of randomness quality using a set of mathematical tools, in which good results have been obtained. The improved map is used to design a cryptosystem; we have proposed an efficient method for the aim of ensuring the diffusion property by feeding back the encrypted message to the modified map. So, a very small change on the plaintext leads to a different chaotic state. The proposed encryption scheme has been evaluated in terms of security, in which some known cryptographic attacks have been performed on it. The results showed that the proposed encryption scheme meets the nowadays security requirements. The proposed encryption scheme is evaluated in real-time using low-cost ARM (Cortex-M3 32-bit RISC core) under two different scenarios, emitter, and receiver, which are connected wirelessly. A comparison with some existing solutions showed that our proposal provides a good ratio between randomness, implementation cost, and performance.