QR Shares based Secret Sharing Scheme using DWT, Random Permutation and Arithmetic Modulo Operation for QR Secret

Abstract

The traditional way of sharing secret images through Secret Image Sharing (SIS) has become more susceptible to malicious users due to its noise-like shared images. Therefore, it is important to investigate new techniques that can provide a secure way of distributing secret images as meaningful shares. To this end, researchers have been exploring different encryption methods, secure communication protocols, and complex patterns for sharing secrets as meaningful shares, which can make it harder to be identified by malicious users. This proposed approach introduces a QR shares-based secret sharing scheme using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Random Permutation (RP), and Arithmetic Modulo (AM) operation. The proposed (n, n) perfect secret sharing scheme requires exactly n shares to reconstruct the secret, and its lightweight operations make it computationally efficient. Although it may not be the most robust approach, it provides a high level of protection as malicious attacks cannot reverse or restore the data. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method produces QR shares of better quality and a restored QR secret with a lossy nature with better visual quality. The performance of the scheme is evaluated using parameters such as correlation, RMSE, PSNR, NPCR, and UACI, showing that it gives better results for QR secrets.