Cryptanalysis and improvement of a reversible data-hiding scheme in encrypted images by redundant space transfer

Abstract Recently, a reversible data hiding scheme by redundant space transfer has been proposed by Liu et al. In this scheme, the encryption process consists of bit plane disordering, sub-block position disordering and different-time Arnold transform in each sub-block. Then, the additional data is embedded into the LSB planes of the encrypted image by compressing the redundant space. However, to transfer the redundancy of the plain image into encrypted image, this scheme essentially just performs three types of disorder operations, which is vulnerable to security analysis. In this paper, we firstly demonstrate that the encryption method of this scheme can be broken by chosen-plaintext attack (CPA). Furthermore, in order to achieve the resistance against CPA, we introduce 2-D Logistic-adjusted-sine map (2D-LASM) to produce the encryption sequences with the control parameters generated from the plain image. Apart from that, we also improve the sparse matrix compression to achieve a superior embedding capacity. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the original one in terms of both security and embedding capacity.