Sharing Secrets in Stego Images with Authentication

[[abstract]]Recently, Lin and Tsai and Yang et al. proposed secret image sharing schemes with steganography and authentication, which divide a secret image into the shadows and embed the produced shadows in the cover images to form the stego images so as to be transmitted to authorized recipients securely. In addition, these schemes also involve their authentication mechanisms to verify the integrity of the stego images such that the secret image can be restored correctly. Unfortunately, these schemes still have two shortcomings. One is that the weak authentication cannot well protect the integrity of the stego images, so the secret image cannot be recovered completely. The other shortcoming is that the visual quality of the stego images is not good enough. To overcome such drawbacks, in this paper, we propose a novel secret image sharing scheme combining steganography and authentication based on Chinese remainder theorem (CRT). The proposed scheme not only improves the authentication ability but also enhances the visual quality of the stego images. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is superior to the previously existing methods

Validation and Data Repairing of Document Image using Steganography Method

This paper attempts to propose a novel technique of blind authentication based on the method of secret in addition to data repair capability for grayscale document images through the use of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image. For every block of a grayscale document image, an authentication signal is generated, which, along with the block content in binary, is transformed into numerous shares using the Shamir secret sharing scheme. The parameters involved are carefully selected so that as many shares as possible can be generated and embedded into an alpha channel plane. After this, the alpha channel plane is combined with the original grayscale image to yield a PNG image. During this process, the computed share values are recorded as a range of alpha channel values near their maximum value of 255 to return a transparent stego-image with a disguised effect. In the image authentication process, marking of an image block is done as tampered, if the authentication signal computed from the current block content does not match the one extracted from the shares embedded in the alpha channel plane. Each tampered block is then subjected to data repairing by a reverse Shamir scheme after collecting two shares from unmarked blocks. Procedures to protect the safety of the data that lies concealed in the alpha channel have been proposed. Decent experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method

Improvements in Geometry-Based Secret Image Sharing Approach with Steganography

Protection of the sensitive data is an important issue because of the fast development of applications that need exchange of the secret information over the Internet. Secret sharing is an idea proposed by Shamir and Blakley separately with different implementations in 1979. Lin and Tsai proposed a method that uses Steganography to create meaningful shares by using Shamir's secret sharing scheme in 2004. In recent years, researchers work to remove some of the weaknesses of this method. However, all of these methods need cover images four times bigger than the secret image. This arises two problems: increased storage and bandwidth need for shares. We used cover images with the same size as the secret image by using both Blakley's secret sharing approach and Steganography. Therefore, we achieved reduced storage and transmission bandwidth for shares. Besides, the proposed method creates meaningful shares by using Steganography instead of noise-like shares, different from other studies that use Blakley's approach

Steganography Approach to Image Authentication Using Pulse Coupled Neural Network

This paper introduces a model for the authentication of large-scale images. The crucial element of the proposed model is the optimized Pulse Coupled Neural Network. This neural network generates position matrices based on which the embedding of authentication data into cover images is applied. Emphasis is placed on the minimalization of the stego image entropy change. Stego image entropy is consequently compared with the reference entropy of the cover image. The security of the suggested solution is granted by the neural network weights initialized with a steganographic key and by the encryption of accompanying steganographic data using the AES-256 algorithm. The integrity of the images is verified through the SHA-256 hash function. The integration of the accompanying and authentication data directly into the stego image and the authentication of the large images are the main contributions of the work

A Visual Cryptography Scheme for User Authentication

A new scheme for user authentication is proposed using visual cryptography and invisible digital watermarking. Visual cryptography which allows visual information to be encrypted in such a way that decryption becomes the job of the person to decrypt via a sight reading. In the proposed work, user signature will be embedded within the cover media. It may be text, images, audio, video etc. Here we used cover image for embedding data by using a single bit LSB watermark insertion algorithm. After that the image will be split into two shares. Shares will be later encrypted by using a Column Shift Permutation algorithm. Receiver will decrypt the shares using Column Shift Permutation algorithm. Shares are collected and stamp together by receiver to get cover image. Then signature will be de-embedded from the cover image. Data will be transfer using communication media. Image will be passed in more secure manner without any distortion. This method is very efficient and effective .The method can be implemented with minimum processing. This application used in customer identification in bank and in online voting