A QUANTUM-RESISTANT FRAMEWORK FOR SECURE RGB IMAGE TRANSMISSION USING ADVANCED COMPUTATIONAL TECHNIQUES

Abstract

Digital RGB images are widely used in applications such as medical imaging, surveillance, and multimedia communication, where they often carry sensitive information that must be protected during transmission and storage. To address this need, this work presents a quantum‑resistant framework for RGB color image encryption and decryption that combines a large‑dimension color key image with computationally efficient operations. The proposed scheme uses a secret key image of arbitrary size and resolution, eliminating the need to transmit the key while significantly enlarging the effective key space and making brute‑force attacks computationally infeasible. Experimental evaluation on multiple color images of varying resolutions demonstrates lossless reconstruction, with peak signal‑to‑noise ratio (PSNR) approaching infinity and mean square error (MSE) equal to zero between the original and decrypted images. Measured encryption and decryption times show an approximately linear relationship with image size, indicating that the method scales predictably while maintaining high throughput. These results suggest that the proposed framework is suitable for real‑time, secure RGB image transmission in resource‑constrained and quantum‑aware environments.