Abstract
In this paper, we propose an efficient and self-adapting colour-image encryption algorithm based on chaos and the interactions among multiple red, green and blue (RGB) layers. Our study uses two chaotic systems and the interactions among the multiple layers to strengthen the cryptosystem for the colour-image encryption, which can achieve better confusion and diffusion performances. In the confusion process, we use the novel Rubik’s Cube Scheme (RCS) to scramble the image. The significant advantage of this approach is that it sufficiently destroys the correlation among the different layers of colour image, which is the most important feature of the randomness for the encryption. The theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the encoding efficiency, enhances the security of the cipher-text, has a large key space and high key sensitivity, and is also able to resist statistical and exhaustive attacks.