SOCIET: Second-order cellular automata and chaotic map-based hybrid image encryption technique

Image encryption plays a vital role in securing sensitive visual information during transmission and storage. This paper proposes SOCIET, a novel lightweight image encryption technique that combines Second-Order Cellular Automata (SOCA) and a chaotic map. The SOCA model is utilized to generate pseudo-random sequences, which are used for pixel shuffling and bitwise XOR operations with the image pixels. The chaotic map is employed to randomly generate the key image from an arbitrary initial vector, enhancing the security of the encryption process. The proposed scheme achieves a high encryption speed due to the lightweight nature of the SOCA model, making it suitable for real-time applications. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed scheme against various attacks, including various statistical analyses and differential attacks.Furthermore, the scheme achieved improvements of 9.47% and 16.5% in terms of MSE and PSNR values compared to the other existing schemes. Moreover, the encryption scheme maintains a low computational complexity, making it suitable for resource-constrained devices.