Hybrid 2D Logistic Chaotic Map and Vernam Cipher for Secure Image Encryption and Steganography

Given the rapid spread of images in the digital domain via open networks, maintaining the confidentiality of information and the secrecy of transmission has become a major challenge. Keeping this in view, the present paper proposes a new hybrid security framework, Cartesian 2D Logistic Chaotic Map Steganography and Vernam-style XOR operation Shannon Cryptography (CLCMS-VCSC), for the secure transmission of images. In the proposed framework, a chaotic map, namely the Cartesian four-quadrant 2D logistic chaotic map, has been used for embedding the encrypted data by utilizing the mechanisms of confusion and two-stage diffusion, while the Vernam-style XOR operation and Shannon entropy analysis provide robustness to the encryption technique. Deterministic symmetric-cipher analysis of the generated ciphertext has also been performed for evaluation only, i.e., to calculate entropy and conditional probabilities, without affecting the encryption technique’s deterministic nature. Evaluation of the proposed framework has been performed on the BOSSBase v1.0.1 dataset, comprising 10,000 grayscale images of size 512×512, achieving a maximum Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 45.7 dB and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) of 0.98, outperforming existing methods under the same experimental conditions. In addition, the proposed framework also exhibits low execution time and a key storage cost of about 20-21.9 bits. The results verify the effectiveness of the CLCMS-VCSC framework in terms of security, visual quality, computational cost, and key management; thus, the framework is more appropriate for secure and covert image communication in contemporary digital settings. The ablation analysis also validates the significance of each proposed module in improving the framework’s performance, thereby verifying the architectural novelty of the CLCMS-VCSC framework.