Joint compression and encryption using chaotically mutated Huffman trees

This paper introduces a new scheme for joint compression and encryption using the Huffman codec. A basic tree is first generated for a given message and then based on a key-stream generated from a chaotic map and depending from the input message, the basic tree is mutated without changing the statistical model. Hence a symbol can be coded by more than one codeword having the same length. The security of the scheme is tested against the known plaintext attack and the brute force attack. Performance analysis including encryption/decryption speed, additional computational complexity and compression ratio are given. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.