Robust hardware implementation of a block-cipher scheme based on chaos and biological algebraic operations

Currently, chaos-based cryptosystems are widely used for the reason of protecting sensitive data. Various different chaos-based cryptography systems with software implementation have been studied and documented in the literature. Nevertheless, with the fast growth of the internet and connected objects, the development of hardware secure and low-resource cryptographic systems is required. This article presents an FPGA implementation of a block-cipher image encryption scheme based on different three-dimensional chaotic systems and genetic operations. Our approach is to define a novel approach to block-cipher hardware systems while basing it on the biological characteristics of DNA and chaos. Firstly, a robust chaos-based PRNG based on four 3D chaotic maps is proposed to create high-quality keys. The generated key sequences validate with no fail the NIST SP 800–22 test suite. Furthermore, some biological operations are added in the encryption process such as DNA biological algebraic operations to strengthen the confusion process and improve the complexity of the generated keys. Verily, a very secure block-cipher method is created to perform encryption and decryption of different images. The cryptosystem is implemented and evaluated on a Xilinx ZedBoard Zynq Evaluation and Development Kit platform. The proposed hardware architecture is capable of securing different sizes of gray-scale, medical and RGB color images. As a result, a new hardware architecture is implemented that accomplishes numerical image confusion and diffusion with a good frequency of 194.906 MHz and high throughput of 49,895,936 Mbps. Furthermore, the simulation results show that the encryption system is capable of higher security against cryptographic attacks. The entropy has reached a new high of 7.9998. A comparative study of the suggested algorithm with various new encryption methods shows that our system produces good results and provides better solutions than the state-of-the-art designs.