This paper proposes a novel four-dimensional strongly dissipative nonlinearly coupled hyperchaotic system, investigates its dynamical characteristics, and demonstrates its applicability through Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA)-encoded RGB image encryption. First, a four-dimensional nonlinearly coupled hyperchaotic system with strong dissipativity is constructed. Nonlinear dynamics analysis methods, including phase trajectory diagrams, Lyapunov exponent spectra, and bifurcation diagrams, are employed to thoroughly reveal the system’s complex dynamical evolution mechanisms. The analysis indicates that the system not only possesses a wide range of chaotic parameters but also exhibits rich phenomena of multiple coexisting attractors, demonstrating a high degree of multistability. This characteristic offers potential advantages for image encryption, as it increases the diversity of dynamical behaviors and enhances sensitivity to initial conditions. The physical realizability of the chaotic behavior is further verified through an analog circuit implementation. Consequently, the system supports the design of encryption algorithms with larger key spaces, stronger resistance to phase space reconstruction, and improved pseudo-randomness, making it particularly suitable for applications with extremely high security requirements. Subsequently, leveraging the highly random chaotic sequences generated by this system, combined with various DNA coding rules and operations, the RGB image components are scrambled and diffused for encryption. Security analysis demonstrates that the algorithm effectively passes examinations across multiple dimensions, including histogram analysis, information entropy, adjacent pixel correlation, Number of Pixel Change Rate (NPCR), Unified Average Changing Intensity (UACI), and The Peak Signal-to-noise Ratio (PSNR). It achieves favorable encryption results, significantly enhances image resistance against attacks, and provides a reliable technical solution for the secure transmission of remote sensing and military images.
Yu et al. (Sat,) studied this question.