Due to the widespread application of augmented and virtual environments, the research into 3D content protection is fundamentally important. To maintain confidentiality, encryption of 3D content, includ-ing the 3D objects and texture images, is essential. In this paper, a novel texture encryption scheme is proposed which complements the existing 3D object encryption methods. The proposed method encrypts texture images by bit masking and a permutation procedure using the Salsa20/12 stream cipher. The method is lightweight and satisfies the security require-ment. It also prevents the partial disclosure of the encrypted 3D surface geometry by protecting the texture patterns from being partially leaked. The scheme has a better speed-security profile than the full encryption and the selective (4 most significant bit-plane) encryption by 128-bit AES. The encryption schemes are implemented and tested with 500 sample tex-ture images. The experimental results show that the scheme has a bet-ter encryption performance compared to the full/selective encryption by 128-bit AES.