Cryptanalysis of “an improvement over an image encryption method based on total shuffling”

•This paper re-evaluates the security of a chaos-based image encryption algorithm.•The shuffling process is very weak and the key space is small.•The image encryption algorithm can be broken with chosen plain-text.•The sensitivity of the cryptosystem to plain-image is very low.

In the past two decades, several image encryption algorithms based on chaotic systems had been proposed. Many of the proposed algorithms are meant to improve other chaos based and conventional cryptographic algorithms. Whereas, many of the proposed improvement methods suffer from serious security problems. In this paper, the security of the recently proposed improvement method for a chaos-based image encryption algorithm is analyzed. The results indicate the weakness of the analyzed algorithm against chosen plain-text.