Security Analysis of Secret Image Sharing

Abstract

Differently from pure data encryption, secret image sharing (SIS) mainly focuses on image protection through generating a secret image into n shadow images (shares) distributed to n associated participants. The secret image can be reconstructed by collecting sufficient shadow images. In recent years, many SIS schemes are proposed, among which Shamir’s polynomial-based SIS scheme and visual secret sharing (VSS) also called visual cryptography scheme (VCS) are the primary branches. However, as the basic research issues, the security analysis and security level classification of SIS are rarely discussed. In this paper, based on the study of image feature and typical SIS schemes, four security levels are classified as well as the security of typical SIS schemes are analyzed. Furthermore, experiments are conducted to evaluate the efficiency of our analysis by employing illustrations and evaluation metrics.