Securing Data Through Steganography and Secret Sharing Schemes: Trapping and Misleading Potential Attackers

Abstract

Data hiding is the process of concealing recognizable digital data by converting it into indiscernible forms, i.e., those that are imperceptible to the human eye, and it uses numerous techniques to accomplish this task. In this article, we propose a new data-hiding technique that uses the concept of steganography and secret image-sharing schemes. The encryption and decryption is carried out at two levels: at the first level, the encryption process is done using steganography; it is then followed by a secret-sharing scheme at the second level. The decryption process is the opposite of the encryption process; accordingly, we use secret sharing at the first level and steganography in the second level. In the encryption process, n + 1 shared images are generated using n cover images and a secret image. By performing the decryption algorithm on these n + 1 shared images, we get n recovered images and one stego image. The proposed scheme is similar to a secret-sharing scheme because it deceives the attacker by producing pseudo images. In addition to deceiving the a t tacker, it also provides an additional advantage to the user by capturing the attacker. The attacker considers n recovered images to be output and follows his/her wrong intuition. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure at both levels and altering any of the n shares will not reveal even a portion of secret information. To check the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, which works efficiently for grayscale and color images, correlation, mean-square error (MSE), and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) techniques were used.