<p>Securing images is of utmost importance in the contemporary digital landscape or in any Internet of Things (IoT) industry. The purpose of this study is to present IELTSoC, a novel image encryption technique that integrates chaotic maps with Cellular Automata (CA) to strengthen security measures. Our encryption approach utilizes the Logistic and Tinkerbell maps, which are renowned for their unpredictable nature, in conjunction with Second-Order Cellular Automata (SOCA) to ensure a strong and reliable encryption. The encryption technique consists of two primary stages: initial generation of chaotic keys via the Logistic and Tinkerbell maps, followed by a diffusion phase facilitated by CA to enhance the encryption. Our results demonstrate that IELTSoC offers robust defense against prevalent forms of attacks, including brute-force and statistical analyses. The approach is sufficiently efficient for real-time utilization, rendering it feasible for secure image transmission and storage. The security analyses verify that the proposed method effectively diminishes the correlation between neighboring pixels in encrypted images and provides a substantial key space, hence increasing the difficulty for attackers to decrypt the images. The proposed scheme achieved an improvement of 10.87% in “Mean Squared Error" (MSE) over the existing techniques. Furthermore, it achieved a “Unified Average Changing Intensity" (UACI) value of 49.8788 in differential analysis. It passed all the randomness tests prescribed by NIST to justify the randomness of the cipher images. In summary, this research presents a potentially successful method for encrypting images that successfully manages both security and performance, thereby advancing the current limits of encryption technology.</p>