Secure Quaternion Feistel Cipher for DICOM Images

An improved and extended version of a quaternion-based lossless encryption technique for digital image and communication on medicine (DICOM) images is proposed. We highlight and address several security flaws present in the previous version of the algorithm originally proposed by Dzwonkowski et al. (2015). The newly proposed secure quaternion Feistel cipher (S-QFC) algorithm retains the concept of a modified Feistel network with modular arithmetic and the use of special properties of quaternions to perform rotations of data sequences in 3D space for each of the cipher rounds. A new and more secure key generation scheme based on quaternion Julia sets is utilized. We also introduce both-sided modular matrix multiplications for the encryption and decryption processes. The proposed S-QFC algorithm eliminates the major security flaws of its predecessor while maintaining high computation speed in comparison to other algorithms originally embedded in DICOM (i.e., advanced encryption standard and triple data encryption standard). A computer-based analysis has been carried out. Simulation results and cryptanalysis are shown at the end of this paper.