Image Encryption Scheme Based on Semiconductor Superlattice Physical Unclonable Function and Thumbnail-Preserving Encryption

In order to balance the usability and privacy of images, researchers proposed thumbnail-preserving encryption. However, existing thumbnail-preserving encryption schemes have problems such as excessive exposure of encrypted images and ineffective key management. To solve these problems, this paper proposes an image encryption scheme based on semiconductor superlattice physical unclonable function and thumbnail-preserving encryption. First, the scheme uses the semiconductor superlattice physical unclonable function to generate the key seed, as the semiconductor superlattice physical unclonable function is unpredictable, the key seed can be distributed over a public channel. Then, in order to reduce the storage required for the use of the key seed, a two-dimensional infinite collapse is used to expand the key stream. Finally, the expanded generated key stream is used to replace and scramble encrypt the image, achieving thumbnail-preserving encryption. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme has passed the experimental evaluation in terms of privacy and usability. Meanwhile, the results of image encryption quality, security analysis, and robustness analysis also show that the proposed scheme has strong competitiveness.