Secret Image Sharing Research Articles

A Quantum Image Secret Sharing Scheme Based on Designated Multi‐Verifier Signature

AbstractThis paper presents a quantum image secret sharing scheme based on designated multi‐verifier signature. First, share images are generated by a 2D hyperchaotic system incorporating sinusoidal mapping, Henon mapping, and Cubic mapping using the cascade modulation method. Quantum Arnold scrambling and diffusion are performed on the secret image. Subsequently, the concept of designated multi‐verifier signature is introduced. In the secret image sharing phase, the pixel values of the share images are used to sign the secret image, and the signed secret image and share images are sent to a trusted third party and designated verifiers, respectively. In this scheme, no carrier images are required, and the share images held by the participants do not contain any information about the secret image. Finally, simulation experiments and security analysis are conducted on IBM Qiskit platform and Matlab software.

Secret image sharing with distinct covers based on improved Cycling-XOR

Secret image sharing (SIS) is a technique used to distribute confidential data by dividing it into multiple image shadows. Most of the existing approaches or algorithms protect confidential data by encryption with secret keys. This paper proposes a novel SIS scheme without using any secret key. The secret images are first quantized and encrypted by self-encryption into noisy ones. Then, the encrypted images are mixed into secret shares by cross-encryption. The image shadows are generated by replacing the lower bit-planes of the cover images with the secret shares. In the extraction phase, the receiver can restore the quantized secret images by combinatorial operations of the extracted secret shares. Experimental results show that our method is able to deliver a large amount of data payload with a satisfactory cover image quality. Besides, the computational load is very low since the whole scheme is mostly based on cycling-XOR operations.

Robust secret color image sharing anti-cropping and tampering in shares

Secret image sharing (SIS) has excellent properties such as loss tolerance and relatively low computational complexity, providing a brand-new solution for image security protection. However, there has been little research on the robustness of SIS systems, such as how to resist cropping or malicious tampering in shares. Existing related schemes generally focus on grayscale images and suffer from issues such as lossy recovery, weak robustness, and serious pixel expansion, which are challenging to meet the requirements of high-quality sensitive image applications. In this regard, a robust SIS scheme for color images is proposed, which can resist large-scale cropping and malicious tampering in shares. According to the idea of “breaking up the whole cropped area into parts, repairing the shares independently”, the proposed scheme can realize lossless recovery of secret images through organic fusion of secret sharing, error-correcting code, and pixel re-arrangement techniques. Even if all the shares are cropped by 25%, it can still achieve lossless recovery regardless of whether the cropping positions intersect or overlap. It can also resist various malicious tampering (such as marking, defacing, and copy-move forgery) as well as image noise. Moreover, it avoids pixel expansion and requires no auxiliary encryption or preprocessing. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is superior to existing schemes in terms of robustness and comprehensive performance, and is expected to promote the practical application of SIS.

A Hierarchical Authorization Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Image Based on Secret Sharing

In the current distributed environment, reversible data hiding in encrypted domain (RDH-ED) cannot grant corresponding privileges according to users’ identity classes. To address this issue, this paper proposes a hierarchical authorization structure embedding scheme based on secret image sharing (SIS) and users’ hierarchical identities. In the first embedding, the polynomial coefficient redundancy generated in the encryption process of the SIS is utilized by the image owner. For the second, the participants are categorized into two parts. One is core users with adaptive difference reservation embedding, and the other is ordinary users with pixel bit replacement embedding. At the time of reconstruction, more than one core user must provide pixel differences, which grants more privileges to core users. The experimental results demonstrate that the average embedding rate (ER) of the test images is 4.3333 bits per pixel (bpp) in the (3, 4) threshold scheme. Additionally, the reconstructed image achieves a PSNR of +∞ and an SSIM of 1. Compared to existing high-performance RDH-ED schemes based on secret sharing, the proposed scheme with a larger ER maintains strong security and reversibility. Moreover, it is also suitable for multiple embeddings involving multilevel participant identities. In conclusion, the results underscore the efficacy of our technique in achieving both security and performance objectives within a complex distributed setting.

Verifiable Changeable Threshold Secret Image Sharing Scheme Based on LWE Problem

Verifiable Changeable Threshold Secret Image Sharing Scheme Based on LWE Problem

Software and hardware realizations for different designs of chaos-based secret image sharing systems

Secret image sharing (SIS) conveys a secret image to mutually suspicious receivers by sending meaningless shares to the participants, and all shares must be present to recover the secret. This paper proposes and compares three systems for secret sharing, where a visual cryptography system is designed with a fast recovery scheme as the backbone for all systems. Then, an SIS system is introduced for sharing any type of image, where it improves security using the Lorenz chaotic system as the source of randomness and the generalized Arnold transform as a permutation module. The second SIS system further enhances security and robustness by utilizing SHA-256 and RSA cryptosystem. The presented architectures are implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to enhance computational efficiency and facilitate real-time processing. Detailed experimental results and comparisons between the software and hardware realizations are presented. Security analysis and comparisons with related literature are also introduced with good results, including statistical tests, differential attack measures, robustness tests against noise and crop attacks, key sensitivity tests, and performance analysis.

Progressive Reconstruction on Region-Based Secret Image Sharing

Progressive Reconstruction on Region-Based Secret Image Sharing

Size-invariant two-in-one image secret sharing scheme based on gray mixing model

TiOISSS (Two-in-One Image Secret Sharing Scheme) can reconstruct the secret through computation and realize secret preview recovery when the power system is destroyed or the network is paralyzed. However, the visual quality of previewing images obtained by the existing TiOISSS is not satisfactory and usually affected by pixel expansion. To resolve the two problems, this paper introduces multiple gray values in the share image generation stage and establishes an optimization model to obtain the grayscale probabilistic matrix needed in the encoding stage. By using the probability matrix, a secret sharing algorithm is designed to obtain size-invariant shares with multiple gray values. Then, the secret information of another image can be shared and embedded into the multi-level gray shares through Lagrange polynomials over finite fields. In the decryption stage, the electronic shares can be directly superimposed based on a gray mixing model, or they can be printed to transparent films by a multi-level gray printer and then superimposed to obtain the preview image. If computational devices are available, a high-resolution gray image can be obtained by Lagrange interpolation over finite fields. Experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme is effective for generating shares without pixel expansion and improving the preview image quality.

Blockchain-Based Secure and Efficient Secret Image Sharing with Outsourcing Computation in Wireless Networks

Abstract: We present a novel solution, the Blockchain-based Secure and Efficient Secret Image Sharing (BC-SESIS) scheme, designed to enhance the security and efficiency of secret image sharing in wireless networks. Traditional Secret Image Sharing (SIS) methods generate multiple shadow images to distribute a secret image, allowing retrieval with a subset of these shadows. However, existing SIS schemes suffer from vulnerabilities, particularly during communication, where shadow images are susceptible to tampering and corruption, compromising security. Leveraging blockchain technology, BC-SESIS encrypts and stores shadow images securely within the blockchain, mitigating risks of tampering and corruption. A smart contract, empowered with identity authentication, ensures the requisite threshold (k, n) for secret image restoration. To alleviate computational burdens on smart contracts and users, we propose an efficient outsourcing computation mechanism. This method delegates the restoration task to agent miners within the encryption domain, ensuring secure execution. The effectiveness of the BC-SESIS scheme is substantiated through theoretical analysis and extensive experimentation. Results underscore its capacity to uphold communication security while delivering high computational efficiency within wireless networks.

Accelerating randomized image secret sharing with GPU: contrast enhancement and secure reconstruction using progressive and convolutional approaches

AbstractImage Secret Sharing (ISS) is a cryptographic technique used to distribute secret images among multiple users. However, current Visual Secret Sharing (VSS) schemes produce a halftone image with only 50% contrast when reconstructing the original image. To overcome this limitation, the Randomized Image Secret Sharing (RISS) scheme was introduced. RISS achieves a higher contrast of 70% when extracting the secret image but comes with a high computational cost. This research paper presents a novel approach called Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)-based Randomized Image Secret Sharing (GRISS), which utilizes data parallelism within the RISS pipeline. The proposed technique also incorporates an Autoencoder-based Single Image Super-Resolution (ASISR) to enhance the contrast of the recovered image. The performance of GRISS is evaluated against RISS, and the contrast of the ASISR images is compared to current benchmark models. The results demonstrate that GRISS outperforms state-of-the-art models in both efficiency and effectiveness.

Blockchain-Based Secure and Efficient Secret Image Sharing With Outsourcing Computation in Wireless Networks

Secret Image Sharing (SIS) is the technology that shares any given secret image by generating and distributing <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</i> shadow images in the way that any subset of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">k</i> shadow images can restore the secret image. However, in the existing SIS schemes, the shadow images will be easily tampered and corrupted during the communication, which will pose serious security issues. Recently, blockchain has emerged as a promising paradigm in the field of data communication and information security. To securely communicate and effectively protect the secret image data in wireless networks, we propose a Blockchain-based Secure and Efficient Secret Image Sharing (BC-SESIS) scheme with outsourcing computation in wireless networks. In the proposed BC-SESIS scheme, the shadow images are encrypted and stored in the blockchain to prevent them from being tampered and corrupted. The identity authentication-enabled smart contract is deployed to achieve the ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">k, n</i> ) threshold for secret image restoring. Furthermore, to reduce the computational burden of smart contract and users, an efficient outsourcing computation method is designed to outsource the restoring task, which is securely implemented by agent miners in the encryption domain. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate that the BC-SESIS scheme can achieve desirable communication security and high computational efficiency in the wireless networks.

Invertible Secret Image Sharing with Authentication for Embedding Color Palette Image into True Color Image

Invertible Secret Image Sharing with Authentication for Embedding Color Palette Image into True Color Image

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

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.

Optical essential secret image sharing using unequal modulus decomposition and gyrator transform

Essential Secret Image Sharing (ESIS) decomposes a secret image into a set of shares that are distributed among categorized participants, and ensures that only authorized subsets of these participants can restore the image. All ESIS schemes to date have been based merely on computational techniques. In this paper, an optical ESIS system is introduced which uses unequal modulus decomposition (UMD) and optical gyrator transform (GT), offering high-speed parallel processing and dispensing with any pre-processing stages. The presented (1, 2, n) ESIS system generates n shares, including one essential share, such that any two shares that include the essential one, can reconstruct the initial secret image with no distortion. Any other unauthorized subset will not gain any information about the image. The scheme generates essential and nonessential shares that are of equal size, eliminating the need to concatenate sub-shares during the reconstruction of the secret image. The results verify that the secret image was completely retrieved in cases of authorized access, while full distortion occurred in cases of unauthorized access. The GT rotation angle serves as an additional authentication factor to validate the essential share and bolster the security. The optical ESIS system exhibits a high level of sensitivity to the changes in the GT rotation angle - that a variation of just 0.001 radians can cause the correlation coefficient to drop below 0.05.

Secret image sharing in the encrypted domain

Nowadays, digital images have a greatly widespread and profound influence on human life, and its security protection problem is increasingly prominent. Image encryption is one of the most effective solutions for image protection but may result in secret concentration or single point of failure. Secret image sharing (SIS) with loss tolerance provides a feasible method to protect secret images in a distributed way. However, existing SIS schemes are most utilized in natural images, and the application of SIS to encrypted images which are widely used in practical scenarios is rarely discussed. Thus, this paper proposes a novel concept of SIS in the encrypted domain (SIS-ED) for the first time on the basis of synthesizing the merits of SIS and image encryption. SIS-ED integrating the encryption and SIS means applying general or user-defined encryption algorithms to encrypt the secret image in the plaintext domain, and in the encrypted domain using appropriate SIS schemes on the encrypted image to share secrets. SIS-ED can prevent secret images from being reconstructed illegally and enhance security against malicious attacks such as differential attacks, which can be widely applied in practical scenarios with high-security requirements such as authentication, blockchain, and cloud systems. In addition, we present a concrete SIS-ED scheme to instantiate the SIS-ED model. The proposed SIS-ED scheme with high security can realize lossless recovery without pixel expansion, and reduced-size shares. Theoretical analysis, experiments, and comparisons are conducted to show the effectiveness and advantages of SIS-ED.

A reversible and lossless secret image sharing scheme with authentication for color images

With the increasing concern for public privacy protection, Secret Image Sharing (SIS) has garnered significant attention among researchers. The goal of SIS is to split a secret image into multiple shadows, rendering it unrecoverable unless a specific threshold of shares is obtained. However, these shadows typically appear as meaningless noise-like patterns, making them susceptible to attacks and raising suspicion when transmitted over traditional internet channels. Moreover, traditional SIS schemes often restrict image formats to binary, limiting their applicability. To address these limitations, we propose a reversible and lossless secret image sharing scheme with authentication specifically designed for color images. Our scheme generates noise-like shadows by combining original secret images and authentication images, which are then embedded into color images using an enhanced steganography method. During the recovery process, participants can extract the shares losslessly and complete the authentication phase without the need for a trusted third party. The authentication results can be easily verified by visual inspection. Ultimately, the qualified shadows are utilized to reconstruct the secret image, ensuring secure transmission of confidential image data. The efficacy and security of our proposed method are demonstrated via theoretical analysis and experimental results.

A compressed sensing-based progressive secret image sharing scheme and security analysis

Cryptographic secret image sharing (SIS) allows a secret image to be shared among participants, and any authorized set of participants can reconstruct the secret. In this paper, we first propose a conceptually simple way to construct a progressive SIS scheme based on semi-tensor product compressed sensing (STP-CS). In the sharing phase, the dealer employs STP-CS to compress the secret image and extracts several different rows of the compressed image in turn. Then the sub-shadows for participants are formed. In addition, he needs to employ a perfect secret sharing to share the measurement matrix (or an initial state of the linear feedback shift register) among all participants. Finally, the sub-shadow and the share of the measurement matrix together constitute the shadow of each participant. In the combination phase, any legitimate access structure can reconstruct the secret image gradually. The perfect secret sharing ensures that the combination phase can work if and only if the access structure is authorized. Simultaneously, the use of STP-CS ensures that the proposed scheme has the properties of gradual reconstruction, noise-resilience, and smaller shadow size. Also, we have proven that the proposed scheme achieves the extended Wyner-sense perfect secrecy. Besides, we provide an extend version, referred to as homomorphic secret image sharing (HSIS), for improving the efficiency of the combination algorithm. HSIS can outsource the combination phase to the cloud servers securely.

SecMISS: Secured Medical Image Secret Sharing mechanism for smart health applications

SecMISS: Secured Medical Image Secret Sharing mechanism for smart health applications

DR-SISM: A dual reversible secret image sharing mechanism

Secret image sharing (SIS) technology has received wide attention from researchers due to its multi-party management of secret information. Traditional SIS algorithms usually convert secret information into the shares of noise-like images, which may attract the attention of hackers and cannot be effectively managed. Moreover, for communication scenario with multiple user participation, participants hope to embed additional data in their shares, while the secret image and the embedded additional information to be reversibly recovered. However, the embedding capacity, security, and authentication capability are limited in the existing SIS algorithms. Therefore, this paper proposes a dual reversible secret image sharing mechanism, called DR-SISM, which includes reversible hiding stage and reversible sharing stage. This proposed DR-SISM can simultaneously achieve the reversible recovery of secret image and additional data embedded. In the first stage, a reversible data hiding method is constructed that leverages the predictive technique of median edge detection to obtain the layered label map for capturing a higher embedding load and utilizes the bit-plane replacement technique to embed additional information. In the second stage, a novel (k,n) threshold reversible SIS strategy is presented by employing the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT), which can generate visually meaningful shares. The authentication bits produced by employing the hash function are embedded into the share, which are utilized to compare with the authentication bits owned by users for verifying the identities of the participants before the secret image reconstruction. Through the comparison of advanced SIS algorithms, our proposed DR-SISM in this article is preferred over the recent algorithms in respect of embedding capacity, security, and authentication capability.

Reversible data hiding based on histogram and prediction error for sharing secret data

With the advancement of communication technology, a large number of data are constantly transmitted through the internet for various purposes, which are prone to be illegally accessed by third parties. Therefore, securing such data is crucial to protect the transmitted information from falling into the wrong hands. Among data protection schemes, Secret Image Sharing is one of the most popular methods. It protects critical messages or data by embedding them in an image and sharing it with some users. Furthermore, it combines the security concepts in that private data are embedded into a cover image and then secured using the secret-sharing method. Despite its advantages, this method may produce noise, making the resulting stego file much different from its cover. Moreover, the size of private data that can be embedded is limited. This research works on these problems by utilizing prediction-error expansion and histogram-based approaches to embed the data. To recover the cover image, the SS method based on the Chinese remainder theorem is used. The experimental results indicate that this proposed method performs better than similar methods in several cover images and scenarios.