A High‐Performance Image Encryption System Using Vectorised DNA and Modular Tangent Chaotic Maps

ABSTRACT

Along with the rapid expansion of the application of cloud computing, social media, medical imaging, satellite images and the internet of things, the security strength and computational performance of image encryption have become increasingly important. Existing DNA‐ and chaos‐based image encryption systems encounter critical challenges, including limited chaotic behaviour, high computational complexity and limited utilisation of vectorisation techniques for parallel processing. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a high‐performance image encryption algorithm that integrates three novel modular tangent maps (MTMs), a key vectorisation algorithm and a vectorised DNA‐based simultaneous permutation‐diffusion framework. The proposed MTMs exhibit enhanced nonlinear dynamics and broad chaotic regions, while the vectorised architecture eliminates most conditional branching and iterative operations, thereby fully exploiting vectorisation for accelerated processing. Dynamical analyses using phase diagrams, bifurcation diagrams, Lyapunov exponent (LE) analysis and entropy evaluation confirm the robustness of the proposed chaotic maps. Security analyses further confirm resistance against statistical and differential attacks, achieving information entropy (IE) values exceeding 7.999 for 512 × 512 images and 7.99 for 256 × 256 images, near‐zero correlation coefficients, excellent NPCR and unified average changing intensity (UACI) performance and suggest high resistance to chosen‐plaintext attacks. Furthermore, experimental results demonstrate significant computational improvements compared with conventional DNA‐based image encryption methods by achieving low computational overhead, with an encryption time of only 0.0342 s for a 256 × 256 image. The proposed framework can provide secure and efficient image encryption designed for modern high‐dimensional multimedia applications.