Implementation and Analysis of Various Visual Cryptographic Techniques for Sensitive Data Protection

Visual Cryptography for General Access Structures

Abstract: A visual cryptography scheme for a set P ofnparticipants is a method of encoding a secret imageSIintonshadow images called shares, where each participant in P receives one share. Certain qualified subsets of participants can “visually” recover the secret image, but other, forbidden, sets of participants have no information (in an information-theoretic sense) onSI. A “visual” recovery for a setX?P consists of xeroxing the shares given to the participants inXonto transparencies, and then stacking them. The participants in a qualified setXwill be able to see the secret image without any knowledge of cryptography and without performing any cryptographic computation. In this paper we propose two techniques for constructing visual cryptography schemes for general access structures. We analyze the structure of visual cryptography schemes and we prove bounds on the size of the shares distributed to the participants in the scheme. We provide a novel technique for realizingkout ofnthreshold visual cryptography schemes. Our construction forkout ofnvisual cryptography schemes is better with respect to pixel expansion than the one proposed by M. Naor and A. Shamir (Visual cryptography,in“Advances in Cryptology?Eurocrypt '94” CA. De Santis, Ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 950, pp. 1?12, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1995) and for the case of 2 out ofnis the best possible. Finally, we consider graph-based access structures, i.e., access structures in which any qualified set of participants contains at least an edge of a given graph whose vertices represent the participants of the scheme.

Halftone visual cryptography

Abstract: Visual cryptography encodes a secret binary image (SI) into n shares of random binary patterns. If the shares are xeroxed onto transparencies, the secret image can be visually decoded by superimposing a qualified subset of transparencies, but no secret information can be obtained from the superposition of a forbidden subset. The binary patterns of the n shares, however, have no visual meaning and hinder the objectives of visual cryptography. Extended visual cryptography was proposed recently to construct meaningful binary images as shares using hypergraph colourings, but the visual quality is poor. In this paper, a novel technique named halftone visual cryptography is proposed to achieve visual cryptography via halftoning. Based on the blue-noise dithering principles, the proposed method utilizes the void and cluster algorithm to encode a secret binary image into n halftone shares (images) carrying significant visual information. The simulation shows that the visual quality of the obtained halftone shares are observably better than that attained by any available visual cryptography method known to date.

Visual cryptography for gray-level images by dithering techniques

Abstract: A (k, n)-threshold visual cryptography scheme is proposed to encode a secret image into n shadow images, where any k or more of them can visually recover the secret image, but any k - 1 or fewer of them gain no information about it. The decoding process of a visual cryptography scheme, which differs from traditional secret sharing, does not need complicated cryptographic mechanisms and computations. Instead, it can be decoded directly by the human visual system. Previous efforts in this topic are almost restricted in processing binary images, which are insufficient for many applications. In this paper, a new visual cryptography scheme suitable for gray-level images is proposed. Instead of using gray subpixels directly to construct shares, a dithering technique is used first to convert a gray-level image into an approximate binary image. Then existing visual cryptography schemes for binary images are applied to accomplish the work of creating shares. The overall effect of the proposed method is the achievement of visual encryption and decryption functions for gray-level images. Some comparisons with a previously proposed method are also made. Some experimental results are shown to prove the feasibility of the proposed method. Finally, an application is mentioned to show its practicability.

Sharing multiple secrets in visual cryptography

Abstract: The secret sharing schemes in conventional visual cryptography are characterized by encoding one shared secret into a set of random transparencies which reveal the secret to the human visual system when they are superimposed. In this paper, we propose a visual secret sharing scheme that encodes a set of x≥2 secrets into two circle shares such that none of any single share leaks the secrets and the x secrets can be obtained one by one by stacking the first share and the rotated second shares with x different rotation angles. This is the first true result that discusses the sharing ability in visual cryptography up to any general number of multiple secrets in two circle shares.

Extended visual cryptography for natural images

Abstract: Extended Visual Cryptography[Ateni01] is a type of cryptography which encodes a number of images in the way that when the images on transparencies are stacked together, the hidden message appears without a trace of original images The decryption is done directly by the human visual system with no special cryptographic calculations This paper presents a system which takes three pictures as an input and generates two images which correspond to two of the three input pictures The third picture is reconstructed by printing the two output images onto transparencies and stacking them together While the previous researches basically handle only binary images, this paper establishes the extended visual cryptography scheme suitable for natural images Generally, visual cryptography suffers from the deterioration of the image quality This paper also describes the method to improve the quality of the output images The trade-off between the image quality and the security are discussed and assessed by observing the actual results of this method Furthermore, the optimization of the image quality is discussed