This paper investigates the dynamics of a 3D plasma system that has a single symmetric double-wing attractor moving around symmetric equilibria. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that changing the space between these wings can degenerate them. Motivated by this concept, we introduce a new controller on the plasma system that can shift its equilibria away from each other, and subsequently break the symmetric double-wing that resembles a butterfly into several independent chaotic attractors. To show the advantage of generating coexisting attractors, we compare between the complexity performance of the multi-stable controlled plasma system and the original plasma system that has single chaotic attractor. Simulation results show that the complexity performance of the multi-stable controlled plasma system is higher than the original system. As a result, and from cryptographic point of view, chaotic ciphers with applying more than one set of initial conditions provide a higher level of security than applying only one set of initial conditions. As an example, we present a new approach for generating S-box based on the multistability behavior of the controlled plasma system. Performance analysis shows that the proposed S-box algorithm can achieve a higher security level and has a better performance than some of the latest algorithms.INDEX TERMS Equilibria, stability, coexisting attractors, fuzzy entropy, chaos-based cryptography.ALAA KADHIM FARHAN received the bachelor's degree in computer science, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in information security from the