A modified Chua chaotic oscillator and its application to secure communications

•A new modification to the Chua oscillator is proposed.•Bifurcation diagrams, Poincaré map and the Lyapunov exponents are presented.•An application to secure communications is presented.•A synchronization scheme based on the modified oscillator is proposed.•System simulations are performed for analysis.

In this paper, a new modified Chua oscillator is introduced. The original Chua oscillator is well known for its simple implementation and mathematical modeling. A modification of the oscillator is proposed in order to facilitate the synchronization and the encryption and decryption scheme. The modification consists in changing the nonlinear term of the original oscillator to a smooth and bounded nonlinear function. A bifurcation diagram, a Poincaré map and the Lyapunov exponents are presented as proofs of chaoticity of the newly modified oscillator. An application to secure communications is proposed in which two channels are used. Numerical simulations are performed in order to analyze the communication system.