Visual Cryptography Using Neighborhood Based Encryption Techniques in The Framework of Cellular Automata

Abstract

Security of digital data during data communication, data exchange, data authentication is very important. Many authentication techniques are used to secure data. Visual cryptography is one of the methods which creates signatures by applying nonlinearity into the data. The signatures consist of cipher and the key. At the receiving end if the key and the cipher match then the authentication is done. Through this visual cryptography technique, the users hide information securely based on key authentication. This paper discusses another approach to visual cryptography using neighborhood-based encryption techniques in the framework of cellular automata. A cellular automaton has a grid of cells. This cell has either value 0 or 1. These values are changed to next state level in a discrete way with respect to time using some fixed rule. A ‘Cellular Automaton’ (CA) is a 2-dimensional finite array of lattice points called cells together with an updating rule that involves values of a cell and of some predetermined neighborhood cells. Cellular automaton rules for visual cryptography are defined. These rules consist of Neighborhood generation phase and signature generation phase. A sample array is considered. Using cellular automaton rules encryption and decryption is done on sample array.