Inspired by the natural ripple-like phenomenon that distorts a reflection on a water surface, this paper introduces a new symmetric image cipher using wave perturbations to shuffle images in an n dimensional (n D) space. Its strong diffusion and confusion properties are ensured by pseudo-random wavefronts and additional salts and peppers bits. Extensive simulations and comparisons demonstrate that the proposed image cipher outperforms several existing bit-level scrambling methods with respect to the encryption quality and computation complexity. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.