Abstract：Very recently, several chaos-based image ciphers using a bit-level permutation have been suggested and shown promising results. Due to the diffusion effect introduced in the permutation stage, the workload of the time-consuming diffusion stage is reduced, and hence the performance of the cryptosystem is improved. In this paper, a symmetric chaosbased image cipher with a 3D cat map-based spatial bit-level permutation strategy is proposed. Compared with those recently proposed bit-level permutation methods, the diffusion effect of the new method is superior as the bits are shuffled among different bitplanes rather than within the same bit-plane. Moreover, the diffusion key stream extracted from hyperchaotic system is related to both the secret key and the plain image, which enhances the security against known/chosen plaintext attack. Extensive security analysis has been performed on the proposed scheme, including the most important ones like key space analysis, key sensitivity analysis, plaintext sensitivity analysis and various statistical analyses, which has demonstrated the satisfactory security of the proposed scheme.

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