Design of image cipher using life-like cellular automata and chaotic map

Recently, a number of image ciphers using cellular automata (CA) or combined with chaotic maps have been proposed. However, most of them suffer from some intrinsic drawbacks such as small rule space, low diffusion and no explicit classification of CA rules. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper presents a novel image cipher based on Life-like cellular automata and chaos. The proposed image cipher consists of two sub-processes: permutation and substitution. In the permutation, a two-dimensional Logistic-adjusted-Sine map (2D-LASM) with excellent properties is adopted to shuffle the pixel positions. In the substitution, a second-order Life-like CA with a balanced rule is employed. The balanced rules make the distribution of 0 and 1 in Life-like CA gradually be in equilibrium during the process of iteration. Second-order CA can preserve the result of CA after each iteration to obtain the reversibility. Furthermore, to resist chosen-plaintext and known-plaintext attacks, the algorithm controls the initial conditions of 2D-LASM by the key and the weighted histogram of the plain-image. Theoretical analysis and experimental results both show that the proposed scheme has prominent cryptographic performances and can resist the common attacks effectively, which is very suitable for image encryption.