Verifiable (t, n) Secret Image Sharing Scheme Based on Slim Turtle Shell Matrix

Abstract

As Internet technology advances rapidly, safeguarding confidential messages has become an increasingly pressing concern. Among the various schemes available, secret image sharing (SIS) has gained considerable attention. Particularly, the (t, n) secret sharing scheme offers robust protection for hidden secret messages. However, it remains challenging to expand the quality of t and n while maintaining acceptable image quality for the share images and enhancing security features. To address these challenges, we have developed a variant turtle shell known as the slim turtle shell, which we incorporate into our innovative (t, n)-SIS scheme. The slim turtle shell technique not only facilitates the creation of meaningful shares but also ensures that the resulting meaningful shares maintain a high level of visual quality, thanks to its impressive embedding capabilities. Additionally, we have devised two authentication mechanisms to validate the integrity of both shares and secret images. These mechanisms facilitate the detection of tampering during the secret message extraction and verification phase, should the integrity be compromised. Empirical results from our experiments demonstrate an impressive embedding capacity of 1,572,864 bits in our proposed scheme, coupled with an average PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) of 45.80 dB. Furthermore, our scheme demonstrates superior authentication capabilities when compared to other existing schemes.