In this article, we propose a key secret-sharing technology based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) to address three major problems in the blockchain: 1) low security; 2) hard recovery of lost keys; and 3) low communication efficiency. In our scheme, the proposed network plays the role of a dealer and treats the secret-sharing process as a classification issue. The key idea is to view the secret as an image during the secret-sharing process. If the user’s private key is text, we can covert the key text into an image called the original image. Specifically, we first divide the original image into original subimages by the image segmentation. Next, we encode each original subimage by DNA coding. Finally, we train the proposed network to find the key secret-sharing results. Our proposed scheme is not only a significant extension of the GANs but also a new direction for the key secret-sharing technology. The simulation results show that the scheme is secure, and both flexible and efficient in communication.

GAN-Based Key Secret-Sharing Scheme in Blockchain

With the speedy progress of network technology and internet applications, protection of digitized data against unauthorized access and modification has become a paramount issue. In order to face this challenge, numerous secret image sharing schemes have been introduced. Secret image sharing scheme is a method used for safeguarding the sensitive digitized image against illegal copying and tempering. The secret image is divided into many random shares in such a way that each share does not reveal any information to the intruders. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey from over 100 papers which explains the new approaches and challenges. This paper also provides a comparative analysis of different methods based on different properties.

A survey paper on secret image sharing schemes

Visual cryptography is an encryption technique that decomposes secret images into multiple shares. These shares are digitally or physically overlapped to recover the original image, negating the need for complex mathematical operations or additional hardware. There have been many variations of visual cryptography proposed over the years, each addressing different problems or to fulfill different security requirements. Existing review papers on the area only cover certain types of visual cryptography or lack comparisons between the various schemes. To address this gap, this paper provides broad overview of the area to aid new researchers in identifying research problems or to select suitable visual cryptography methods for their desired applications. For more veteran researchers in the area, our paper provides the most up-to-date coverage of the state-of-the-art. We first provide an introduction to the various categories of visual cryptography techniques, including a discussion on recently proposed schemes. These schemes are then compared in terms of their features, performance metrics, advantages and disadvantages. Compared to prior work, we extend the number of comparison metrics to include signal-to-noise ratio and the type of shares. Over 40 visual cryptography schemes that have been proposed in the past two decades were analyzed and compared. Our findings indicate that existing problems such as pixel expansion, poor quality of recovered image quality, computational and memory complexities still exist, and a optimizing the trade-off between these requirements still requires further investigation. We conclude the paper with a discussion of these open problems and future research directions.

An overview of visual cryptography techniques

A visual cryptography scheme (VCS) is a kind of secret sharing scheme which allows the encoding of a secret image into n shares distributed to n participants. The beauty of such a scheme is that a set of qualified participants is able to recover the secret image without any cryptographic knowledge and computation devices. An extended visual cryptography scheme (EVCS) is a kind of VCS which consists of meaningful shares (compared to the random shares of traditional VCS). In this paper, we propose a construction of EVCS which is realized by embedding random shares into meaningful covering shares, and we call it the embedded EVCS. Experimental results compare some of the well-known EVCSs proposed in recent years systematically, and show that the proposed embedded EVCS has competitive visual quality compared with many of the well-known EVCSs in the literature. In addition, it has many specific advantages against these well-known EVCSs, respectively.

Embedded Extended Visual Cryptography Schemes.

A Secure Image Encryption Algorithm Based on Hill Cipher System

An Optimal (k,n)Visual Secret Sharing Scheme for Information Security

Halftone Visual Cryptography (HVC) is an encryption technique that encodes the secret image into halftone images in order to produce secure meaningful shares. Many methods have been proposed for developing HVC to protect the security of the images. Yet, these methods still have some problems such as poor visual quality of shares, large pixel expansion, interference of secret image on shared images, and interference shared images on retrieved image. To solve such problems, an optimized HVC scheme (OHVCS) using Error Diffusion (ED) is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme eliminates the explicit requirement of codebook and reduces the random patterns of the shared images, as it encodes only the black pixels of the secret image, taking into account that the pixel expansion is the smallest size to be used. Moreover, it performs the basic concept of Visual Cryptography (VC); therefore, the security of the construction scheme is assured. The experimental results, performance evaluation through statistical analysis, and comparison with some existing schemes in various aspects of HVC show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Mahmoud E. Hodeish

Papers

An Optimal (k,n)Visual Secret Sharing Scheme for Information Security

An Optimized Halftone Visual Cryptography Scheme Using Error Diffusion

A New Efficient TKHC-based Image Sharing Scheme over Unsecured Channel