A general quantitative cryptanalysis of permutation-only multimedia ciphers against plaintext attacks

  • Authors:

  • Shujun Li;Chengqing Li;Guanrong Chen;Nikolaos G. Bourbakis;Kwok-Tung Lo

  • Affiliations:

  • FernUniversität in Hagen, Lehrgebiet Informationstechnik, Universitätsstraíe 27, 58084 Hagen, Germany;Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China;Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China;Information Technology Research Institute, College of Engineering and Computer Science, Wright State University, 3640 Glenn Hwy, Dayton, OH 45435, USA;Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China

  • Venue:
  • Image Communication
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

In recent years secret permutations have been widely used for protecting different types of multimedia data, including speech files, digital images and videos. Based on a general model of permutation-only multimedia ciphers, this paper performs a quantitative cryptanalysis on the performance of these kind of ciphers against plaintext attacks. When the plaintext is of size MxN and with L different levels of values, the following quantitative cryptanalytic findings have been concluded under the assumption of a uniform distribution of each element in the plaintext: (1) all permutation-only multimedia ciphers are practically insecure against known/chosen-plaintext attacks in the sense that only O(log"L(MN)) known/chosen plaintexts are sufficient to recover not less than (in an average sense) half elements of the plaintext; (2) the computational complexity of the known/chosen-plaintext attack is only O(n.(MN)^2), where n is the number of known/chosen plaintexts used. When the plaintext has a non-uniform distribution, the number of required plaintexts and the computational complexity is also discussed. Experiments are given to demonstrate the real performance of the known-plaintext attack for a typical permutation-only image cipher.