https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-025-06759-2
Regular Article
Attack an image cipher algorithm combined new DNA operation with chaotic map
Yangjiang Housing and Urban-Rural Development Department, Engineering Quality and Safety Center, No.409 Shiwan North Road, 529500, Yangjiang, China
Received:
15
July
2025
Accepted:
17
August
2025
Published online:
2
September
2025
This study presents a comprehensive security analysis of the image cryptosystem based on a novel chaotic map and dynamic DNA operations (ICS-NCM-DDO). The system adopts the traditional scrambling–substitution–scrambling framework, using a new chaotic map to enable dynamic DNA operations. Despite the claims of the original authors about its resilience to attacks, the rigorous mathematical analysis of this study identifies critical vulnerabilities in ICS-NCM-DDO, specifically three flaws: First, while using SHA-256 for dynamic properties, treating the plaintext hash as a key violates Kirchhoff’s principle. This breaches security tenets, makes decryption unfeasible at the receiver, and causes dynamic degradation in key generation since the hash value is not a valid key. Second, the so-called innovative DNA operations are essentially 2-bit substitutions with equivalent key, weakening the system’s theoretical security. Third, lacking diffusion mechanisms, ICS-NCM-DDO has extremely low sensitivity, leading to deterministic pixel positional and value mappings between plaintext and ciphertext. By exploiting these vulnerabilities, the study successfully attacks ICS-NCM-DDO, validating its inadequacy for secure communication. Supported by theoretical and empirical results, the conclusions highlight the need to reevaluate and enhance similar cryptographic schemes.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
