A Novel Secret Key Exchange Mechanism for Secure Communication and Data Transfer in Symmetric Cryptosystems

Abstract

Secure communication and Secure data transfer are one of the significant challenges in the era of Internet. With the development in information technology, there arose a need for invulnerable transfer of data. Visual Cryptography is the method in which the secrets are encoded in the form of shares which can be decrypted by overlapping the shares that are obtained. As the usage of images in the industrial process is rapidly rising, it is vital to protect the confidential image data from unauthorized access. The (2,2) Visual Cryptography scheme involves the encoding of the image to create two shares. It is later obtained through the stacking process. Further, Halftoning technique can be applied by the dithering process for the approximation of the colors in the image. It makes use of Floyd’s Steinberg Algorithm which uses the dithering process by mapping the required color from the eight color bit palette assigned. The design layout is broken down into two module. The first module is used to convert the image into a binary image, and the other module is used to pass the input image to Floyd’s Steinberg algorithm. This technique can be best suited for the application in the banking system or any other field where confidentiality is the primary concern.