Abstract: With the development of the fifth generation (5G) mobile communication technology, images are widely used in key fields such as internet, medical diagnosis and satellite observation, and the security of picture information is becoming increasingly important. For the secure transfer of image data in the internet, a new image encryption scheme based on one-dimensional quantum walks on a circle is proposed in this work. The scheme utilizes the power of quantum walks to construct permutation boxes and generates exclusive or (xor) numbers for encryption, and innovatively introduces the generation of control matrix to control the image encryption after image blocking. The simulation and numerical analyses show that the proposed encryption algorithm has good performance and security, the histograms of images after encryption tend to uniform distribution, the pixel correlation coefficient approaches 0, and the key space reaches 2212 , the information entropy reaches 7.99, which can effectively resist brute force attacks,statistical attacks and other attack methods. In addtion, the scheme also shows good performance in sensitivity and anti-noise.

Key words: quantum optics, picture encryption, one-dimensional quantum walks, control matrix, permutation boxes, pseudo-random number generator