High-payload secret hiding mechanism for QR codes

Abstract

QR code is an important approach of information transmission and is widely used in our daily life. As a public patent, the message embeded in a QR code can be easily decoded by any QR code reader, thus can lead to information leaks when delivering the secret message with QR code. To overcome this weakness, we exploited the characteristics of Reed-Solomon code and turtle shell matrix to propose a simple yet efficient data embedding mechanism to hide secret messages in the QR code while maintaining the marked QR code valid. Different from the traditional schemes, the proposed scheme of this paper hides the secret messages without sacrificing the error correction capacity of QR code and is able to achieve a higher secret payload. Meanwhile, the public message of generated marked QR code still can be decoded by standard QR code reader. Such nature will reduce the risk due to the curiosity of the malicious users. Experiments were performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. Experimental results showed that the proposed scheme is robust to several common image attacks.