Abstract

Color image encryption has received considerable research attention with many schemes proposed to address practical security needs. However, most of these schemes process plain images as a single unified block and often remain vulnerable to differential attacks and show poor sensitivity to plain image changes. Built on the substitution–permutation network architecture, this paper constructs a new scheme that adopts adaptive quadtree decomposition and the BLAKE3 hash function to enhance the security and sensitivity of the encryption process. Performance evaluations confirm that the scheme withstands brute-force, statistical, and differential attacks.

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