Fast Image Encryption with a Cellular Automata

Shin Lee

Western Reserve Academy

Abstract

Due to the improvements of cryptology based off of the RSA encryption algorithm, modern society can communicate with each other safely online. However, when transmitting heavy data such as photos or videos, the RSA algorithm will be overwhelmed with the overhead of computing huge prime computations. In this paper, I have developed a methodology to transmit images securely like the RSA, but with faster processing time. To achieve this, I have utilized 2D Cellular Automata and its characteristic that when invertible rules are applied they can be used to encrypt and decrypt data. An experiment of this algorithm conducted at the end resulted in more than ten times faster processing time for encryption/decryption than the RSA.

Please click to read the paper.