Chaotic systems without equilibrium are of interest because they are the systems with hidden attractors. A nonequilibrium system with chaos is introduced in this work. Chaotic behavior of the system is verified by phase portraits, Lyapunov exponents, and entropy. We have implemented a real electronic circuit of the system and reported experimental results. By using this new chaotic system, we have constructed S-boxes which are applied to propose a novel image encryption algorithm. In the designed encryption algorithm, three S-boxes with strong cryptographic properties are used for the sub-byte operation. Particularly, the S-box for the sub-byte process is selected randomly. In addition, performance analyses of S-boxes and security analyses of the encryption processes have been presented.

This paper reports about a novel three-dimensional chaotic system with three nonlinearities. The system has one stable equilibrium, two stable equilibria and one saddle node, two saddle foci and one saddle node for different parameters. One salient feature of this novel system is its multiple attractors caused by different initial values. With the change of parameters, the system experiences mono-stability, bi-stability, mono-periodicity, bi-periodicity, one strange attractor, and two coexisting strange attractors. The complex dynamic behaviors of the system are revealed by analyzing the corresponding equilibria and using the numerical simulation method. In addition, an electronic circuit is given for implementing the chaotic attractors of the system. Using the new chaotic system, an S-Box is developed for cryptographic operations. Moreover, we test the performance of this produced S-Box and compare it to the existing S-Box studies.