In many cases, images contain sensitive information and patterns that require secure processing to avoid risk. It can be accessed by unauthorized users who can illegally exploit them to threaten the safety of people’s life and property. Protecting the privacies of the images has quickly become one of the biggest obstacles that prevent further exploration of image data. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-preserving scheme to protect sensitive information within images. The proposed approach combines deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequencing code, Arnold transformation (AT), and a chaotic dynamical system to construct an initial S-box. Various tests have been conducted to validate the randomness of this newly constructed S-box. These tests include National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) analysis, histogram analysis (HA), nonlinearity analysis (NL), strict avalanche criterion (SAC), bit independence criterion (BIC), bit independence criterion strict avalanche criterion (BIC-SAC), bit independence criterion nonlinearity (BIC-NL), equiprobable input/output XOR distribution, and linear approximation probability (LP). The proposed scheme possesses higher security wit NL = 103.75, SAC ≈ 0.5 and LP = 0.1560. Other tests such as BIC-SAC and BIC-NL calculated values are 0.4960 and 112.35, respectively. The results show that the proposed scheme has a strong ability to resist many attacks. Furthermore, the achieved results are compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. The comparison results further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm
