Cryptanalysis of a chaos-based cryptosystem with an embedded adaptive arithmetic coder

In this paper, we analyse a new chaos-based cryptosystem with an embedded adaptive arithmetic coder, which was proposed by Li Heng-Jian and Zhang J S (Li H J and Zhang J S 2010 Chin. Phys. B 19 050508). Although this new method has a better compression performance than its original version, it is found that there are some problems with its security and decryption processes. In this paper, it is shown how to obtain a great deal of plain text from the cipher text without prior knowledge of the secret key. After discussing the security and decryption problems of the Li Heng-Jian et al. algorithm, we propose an improved chaos-based cryptosystem with an embedded adaptive arithmetic coder that is more secure.