A control method for the robust synchronization of a class of chaotic systems with unknown time delay, unknown uncertainty, and unknown disturbance is presented. The robust controller was designed using a nonlinear fractional order PID sliding surface. The Lyapunov method was used to determine the update laws, prove the stability of the proposed mechanism, and guarantee the convergence of the synchronization errors to zero. The simulation was performed using MATLAB software to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism, and the results showed that it was efficient. Finally, the proposed method was combined with a secure communication application to encrypt images, and the results obtained were favorable regarding the standard criteria of correlation, NPCR, PSNR, and information entropy.