A lightweight noise-tolerant encryption scheme for secure communication: An unmanned aerial vehicle application

In the modern era, researchers have focused a great deal of effort on multimedia security and fast processing to address computational processing time difficulties. Due to limited battery capacity and storage, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) must use energy-efficient processing. In order to overcome the vulnerability of time inefficiency and provide an appropriate degree of security for digital images, this paper proposes a new encryption system based on the bit-plane extraction method, chaos theory, and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). Using confusion and diffusion processes, chaos theory is used to modify image pixels. In contrast, bit-plane extraction and DWT are employed to reduce the processing time required for encryption. Multiple cyberattack analysis, including noise and cropping attacks, are performed by adding random noise to the ciphertext image in order to determine the proposed encryption scheme’s resistance to such attacks. In addition, a variety of statistical security analyses, including entropy, contrast, energy, correlation, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and mean square error (MSE), are performed to evaluate the security of the proposed encryption system. Moreover, a comparison is made between the statistical security analysis of the proposed encryption scheme and the existing work to demonstrate that the suggested encryption scheme is better to the existing ones.