Image Encryption using Improved Keystream Generator of
Achterbahn-128
Aissa Belmeguenai
1
, Oulaya Berrak
2
and Khaled Mansouri
2
1
Laboratoire de Recherche en Electronique de Skikda, Universit´e 20 Aoˆut 1955- Skikda,
BP 26 Route d’El-hadaeik Skikda, Algeria
2
Department of Electronics, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Badji Mokhtar University, LP 12 Annaba, Algeria
Keywords:
Boolean Function, Image Encryption, Keystream Generator, Stream Cipher, Security Analysis.
Abstract:
The images transmission become more and more widely used in everyday life and even have been known
to be vulnerable to interception and unauthorized access. The security of their transmission became neces-
sary. In this paper an improved version of the Achterbahn -128 for image encryption and decryption have
been proposed. The proposed design is based on seventeen binary primitive nonlinear feedback shift registers
(NLFSRs) whose polynomials are primitive and a nonlinear Boolean function. The outputs of seventeen regis-
ters are combined by the nonlinear Boolean function to produce keysteam sequence. The proposed scheme is
compared to a Achterbahn-128. The results of several experimental, statistical analysis and sensitivity analysis
show that the proposed image encryption scheme is better than Achterbahn-128 and provides an efficient and
secure way for image encryption and transmission.
1 INTRODUCTION
The images are very largely used in our daily life;
with recent development of information and com-
munication technology, images transmission becomes
more critical day by day. Higher security for trans-
mitting data is highly required. Therefore, the stream
cipher is an important issue.
Stream cipher is secret key encryption system,
which combines plain text bits with a pseudo-random
bit sequence. Stream ciphers are widely used in many
domains (industrial, governmental, telecommunica-
tions and individuals), because they have the advan-
tage of no error propagation, and are particularly suit-
able for use in environments where no buffering is
available and /or plaintext elements need to be pro-
cessed individually.
The multiplied number of attacks concerning
the stream cipher systems based on linear feed-
back shift registers (combination model or filtering
model) (Berlekamp, 1968), (Massey, 1969), (Siegen-
thaler, 1985), (Meier and Staffelbach, 1988), (Golic,
1994), (Courtois and Meier, 2003), and (Courtois,
2003) have led many researchers to be interested
to the design based on primitive nonlinear feedback
shift registers (NLFSRs), primarily motivated by eS-
TREAM, the ECRYPT stream cipher project (eS-
TREAM, 2002). Here we can mention the research
works (Gottfert and Kniffler, 2006) and (Johansson
and Meier, 2006).
In this paper a new version of Achterbahn-128
based on primitive NLFSRs oriented stream cipher
and also the implementation of this generator for im-
ages encryption is introduced. The new version is
based on seventeen binary primitive nonlinear feed-
back shift registers and a Boolean combining func-
tion. All feedback shift registers (NLFSRs) employed
are primitive and nonlinear. The combining function
achieves the best possible trade-offs between alge-
braic degree, resiliency order and nonlinearity (that
is, achieving Siegenthaler’s bound and Sarkar et al.’s
bound).
The proposed version is compared with the
Achterbahn-128. The comparison of the performance
of the two designs is investigated for different images.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2
we recall the Achterbahn-128. Section 3 gives the
specification of the proposed design. In Section 4
we consider the software implementation of the pro-
posed design for image encryptionand decryption and
in section 5 we give the results of our visual testing.
In section 6 we give the security analysis. Section 7
concludes the paper.