International Association
for Cryptologic Research

In the past twenty years, the study of the conjunction of chaos and cryptography has attracted much interest but also met with many problems. Today the security of chaos-based encryptions is usually not considered comparable to those based on number theoretic functions. In this paper, instead of making an encryption system, we focus on the more fundamental notion of one-way function, which is a well-defined function that is easy to evaluate but hard to invert. We see that it is more natural to compare chaotic systems with one-way functions, and such a study could possibly give new insights for chaos-based cryptosystems. We propose a function based on Chebyshev polynomials, and we argue it is likely a one-way function.