Abstract

Data security is prominent today primarily due to the numerous applications of digital images in the contemporary world. Innovations in lightweight encryption are being perceived as the solutions that would allow enhancing the levels of protection while incurring minimal impact on the size of the data and the speed of the processes. The lightweight encryption of images having lower complexities is a good choice in different suites, namely, in cloud computing systems and using social networks for communication. All users will not have to worry about their data being hacked when sharing the images. This paper presents a new lightweight image encryption technique that utilizes the ChaCha20 keys generator with the 16-round Serpent algorithm to provide a lightweight encryption process. The security analysis findings indicate that the suggested cipher is capable of withstanding both known and chosen plaintext attacks. Additionally, it exhibits a high degree of unpredictability, a significant level of security, and a strong sensitivity to key variations. The assessment of the encryption methods is done with the assistance of equipment through histogram analysis, entropy calculation, correlation analysis, mean squared error measurement, peak signal-to-noise ratio calculation, unified average change intensity assessment, normalized pixel difference rate analysis, and structural similarity index. As stated by experimental results, the proposed encryption method performs very well when adopted by various measuring instruments, the value of the information entropy equals to 7.98, which is nearly equivalent to the perfect value of 8. In addition, the value obtained for the normalized pixel difference rate is greater than 99.55%, with the unified average changing intensity equal to 30.11. As it has been mentioned, the decryption process can work very well.