Key based Visual Cryptography Scheme using Novel Secret Sharing Technique with Steganography

Abstract

With rapidly growing network, Internet has become a primary source of transmitting confidential or secret data such as military information, financial documents, etc. In such cases, techniques devoted to protect such kind of information are needed and they play an important role in providing confidential and secure transmission over network. Visual Cryptography is also one of them which is used to hide secret visual information (such as image, text, etc) in which secret sharing scheme is used. Secret sharing is used to encrypt a secret image into customized versions of the original image. There are many secret sharing algorithms in literature including Shamir, Blakley, and Asmuth-Bloom to divide the image into no. of shares. These sharing schemes lead to computational complexity and also generate shares like noisy images. Then afterwards Lin & Tsai proposed a scheme which creates meaningful shares but having same computational complexity as like Shamir's scheme. Along with this, in these schemes, as decryption is done using Human Visual system, the secret can be retrieved by anyone if person get at least k no. of shares. To overcome all above problems, we are suggesting one new method in which a symmetric secret key is used to encrypt the image and then secret shares are generated from this image using Novel secret sharing technique with steganography. So, finally this method will produce meaningful shares and use of secret key will ensure the security of scheme. This scheme can become a reliable solution suitable for today's authentication challenges. Index Terms: Visual cryptography, Secret sharing, steganography.