Interactive media applications in smart electronic business (e-business), for example, web based exchanging and Internet advertising, dependably face security issues in storing and retrieval of text, images, audio and video. The proposed work addresses the problem of security in e-commerce and proposes a unified framework to secure the image data that are stored in the third party cloud. A three-stage image encryption procedure is proposed in this paper, which combines integer wavelet transform (IWT), chaotic maps and deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) encoding rule. The proposed technique uses five levels of security by generating five key sequences through five different chaotic maps. A grayscale image is partitioned as 8 × 8 blocks. Key 1 is generated using logistic map to select an 8 × 8 block randomly. Line map is utilized to create Key 2, in order to scramble the selected 8 × 8 block. Tent map derives Key 3 to randomize the choice of IWTs between Haar or 5/3. Approximation coefficients are scrambled using Key 4 derived from Henon map. The resultant scrambled block is encrypted by selecting a DNA rule using Key 5 that is generated using sine map. The proposed methodology is validated through several performance analysis metrics, and the algorithm achieves an entropy of 7.99, PSNR of 9 dB and near-zero correlation. The algorithm is also resistant to differential attacks and brute force with the key space greater than 2128. © 2019, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.