Secure image sharing method over unsecured channels

Abstract

Image sharing has become a prominent field in large and small networks. However, in order to deliver the shares to their respective shareholders, we need a secure channel to protect the shares from potential attacks by other users on the network. These users can locate the shares and retrieve the image using the Lagrange interpolation method if they are able to locate the minimum required number of shares. This paper proposes a method to protect the privacy and security of the shares when sending them through unsecured channels. The proposed method is divided into three phases. In the first phase, image pixels are changed using the column and row indices, then the shares are created using Shamir's secret sharing (SSS) method. Then a relationship is created between the shares using a linear independence function. In the second phase, the first part of the image is encrypted to hide the solver data. Finally, in the third phase, the data is shared using the SSS method. Participants can retrieve the whole image by applying the reverse order of the proposed method using only the information from the sender through the same channel. The simulation results show that the proposed method is efficient and robust against different types of attacks and can be used to send the shares over unsecured channels.