A Verifiable Steganography-Based Secret Image Sharing Scheme in 5G Networks

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With the development and innovation of new techniques for 5G, 5G networks can provide extremely large capacity, robust integrity, high bandwidth, and low latency for multimedia image sharing and storage. However, it will surely exacerbate the privacy problems intrinsic to image transformation. Due to the high security and reliability requirements for storing and sharing sensitive images in the 5G network environment, verifiable steganography-based secret image sharing (SIS) is attracting increasing attention. The verifiable capability is necessary to ensure the correct image reconstruction. From the literature, efficient cheating verification, lossless reconstruction, low reconstruct complexity, and high-quality stego images without pixel expansion are summarized as the primary goals of proposing an effective steganography-based SIS scheme. Compared with the traditional underlying techniques for SIS, cellular automata (CA) and matrix projection have more strengths as well as some weaknesses. In this paper, we perform a complimentary of these two techniques to propose a verifiable secret image sharing scheme, where CA is used to enhance the security of the secret image, and matrix projection is used to generate shadows with a smaller size. From the steganography perspective, instead of the traditional least significant bits replacement method, matrix encoding is used in this paper to improve the embedding efficiency and stego image quality. Therefore, we can simultaneously achieve the above goals and achieve proactive and dynamic features based on matrix projection. Such features can make the proposed SIS scheme more applicable to flexible 5G networks. Finally, the security analysis illustrates that our scheme can effectively resist the collusion attack and detect the shadow tampering over the persistent adversary. The analyses for performance and comparative demonstrate that our scheme is a better performer among the recent schemes with the perspective of functionality, visual quality, embedding ratio, and computational efficiency. Therefore, our scheme further strengthens security for the images in 5G networks.