YRBS coding with logistic map – a novel Sanskrit aphorism and chaos for image encryption Sundararaman Rajagopalan 1 & Shriramana Sharma 2 & Sridevi Arumugham 1 & Har Narayan Upadhyay 1 & John Bosco Balaguru Rayappan 1 & Rengarajan Amirtharajan 1 Received: 12 February 2018 /Revised: 15 August 2018 /Accepted: 20 August 2018 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract The role of image encryption in secure communication of confidential images is quite significant and novel schemes to encrypt images always have a demand in the scientific research community. DNA coding has found a noteworthy position in various earlier proposed image encryption schemes because of its simple but effective diffusion capabilities. Similar to the DNA coding, novel coding technique based on an aphorism present in the Sanskrit literature has been utilized in this image encryption work. The utility of Sanskrit sūtra ‘yamātārājabhānasalagam (YRBS)’ for performing scrambling, substitution and cyclic bit shifting promises the usage of this scheme as a part of various image encryption solutions. In this approach, YRBS coding has been employed along with simple one dimensional logistic map for encrypting 256 × 256 grayscale test images. The suggested scheme possesses a keyspace of 4.3769 × 10 46 and average correlation figures of −0.00021, −0.00021, −0.00015 in horizontal, vertical and diagonal directions respectively when applied on ten test images. The encrypted pixels passed the NIST Test suite and this approach also offers a good resistance to chosen cipher text attack which was a challenge in DNA coding. Keywords Image encryption . YRBS coding . Logistic map 1 Introduction Rapid growth in Internet technologies facilitates the communication of multimedia contents over the various networks. However, the issue of secure communication avoiding illegal copying and distribution needs serious attention [11, 27]. Image encryption looks to be a Multimedia Tools and Applications https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-6574-4 * Sundararaman Rajagopalan raman@ece.sastra.edu 1 School of Electrical & Electronics Engineering, SASTRA Deemed University, Thanjavur 613 401, India 2 Shri Kanchi Shankara Mutt, Nerur, Karur Dt, Tamil Nadu, India