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

Penerapan Secret Image Sharing Menggunakan Steganografi dengan Metode Dynamic Embedding dan Authentication-Chaining

Teknik yang banyak digunakan untuk menyebarkan suatu citra rahasia kepada n orang adalah dengan cara membagi citra rahasia ke dalam beberapa bagian yang kemudian diproses menggunakan skema (k, n)-Shamir Secret Sharing yang dikemukakan oleh Adi Shamir (1979). Bagian-bagian dari citra rahasia yang sudah diproses tersebut disisipkan ke dalam n citra kamuflase dan menghasilkan n citra stego. Penyisipan dilakukan sedemikian rupa sehingga kualitas visual citra stego semirip mungkin dengan citra kamuflase. Cara untuk memproteksi citra stego dari orang yang tidak berhak adalah dengan cara menyisipkan suatu bit otentikasi yang berfungsi sebagai suatu digital signature dari citra stego. Citra rahasia dapat dirangkai kembali jika terdapat minimal k citra stego asli. Teknik ini dinamakan Secret Image Sharing

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

A Reversible Steganography Scheme of Secret Image Sharing Based on Cellular Automata and Least Significant Bits Construction

Secret image sharing schemes have been extensively studied by far. However, there are just a few schemes that can restore both the secret image and the cover image losslessly. These schemes have one or more defects in the following aspects: (1) high computation cost; (2) overflow issue existing when modulus operation is used to restore the cover image and the secret image; (3) part of the cover image being severely modified and the stego images having worse visual quality. In this paper, we combine the methods of least significant bits construction (LSBC) and dynamic embedding with one-dimensional cellular automata to propose a new lossless scheme which solves the above issues and can resist differential attack and support parallel computing. Experimental results also show that this scheme has the merit of big embedding capacity

An Efficient CRT based Digital Image Watermarking using Double Density Wavelet Transform

Digital Watermarking is an unpretentious and effective approach to afford copyright fortification. Watermark transparency is obligatory primarily for copyright protection. The challenge is to introduce a digital watermark that is both transparent and highly robust to common signal processing and possible attacks. The two basic requirements for an effective watermarking scheme, robustness and transparency, conflict with each other.This paper proposesa watermarking technique for digital gray scale images that is based on utilizing congruence’s in number theory and its generalizations in abstract algebra which have been developed in the context of image compression. Watermarking scheme is based on a Chinese Remainder Theorem along with Double Density Discrete Wavelet Transform framework individually which allows for the possibility of directly watermarking the Image bitstream, Watermark region selection is based on transformation level. In proposed scheme, initially, the cover image and watermark are transformed into spatial domain using Double Density Wavelet Transform and then singular values of these transformed images are combined using CRT coefficients. Our scheme is shown to provide very good results both in terms of image transparency and robustness. An optimal watermark embedding method is developed to achieve minimum watermarking distortion. Experimental results are provided in terms of Peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), Mean Squared Error (MSE), Correlation and Weighted Peak signal to noise ratio (WPSNR) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm

Cellular Automata Based Image Authentication Scheme Using Extended Visual Cryptography

Most of the Visual Cryptography based image authentication schemes hide the share and authentication data into cover images by using an additional data hiding process. This process increases the computational cost of the schemes. Pixel expansion, meaningless shares and use of codebook are other challenges in these schemes. To overcome these issues, an authentication scheme is proposed in which no embedding into the cover images is performed and meaningful authentication shares are created using the watermark and cover images. This makes the scheme completely imperceptible. The watermark can be retrieved just by superimposing these authentication shares, thus reducing the computational complexity at receiver's side. Cellular Automata is used to construct the master share that provides self-construction ability to the shares. The meaningful authentication shares help in enhancing the security of the scheme while size invariance saves transmission and storage cost. The scheme possesses the ability of tamper detection. Experimental results demonstrate the improved security and quality of the generated shares of the proposed scheme as compared to existing schemes

Anti-Forensics with Steganographic File Embedding in Digital Image Using Genetic Algorithm

In this study, a steganography method on digital images as anti-forensics by utilizing genetic algorithms was proposed. Genetic Algorithms are artificial intelligence whose functions are optimization and search. The purpose of this research is to optimize steganography as anti-forensic by applying a Genetic Algorithm and combined with the Hilbert curve, lempel Ziv Markov chain, and least significant bit. The result provides a new steganography method by combining various existing methods. The proposed method will be tested for image quality using PSNR, SSIM, Chi-Squared steganalysis and RS-Analysis, and extraction test. The novelty obtained from the developed method is that the steganography method is as optimal as anti-forensic in keeping confidential data, has a large embedding capacity, and is able to be undetected using forensic methods. The results can maintain data confidentiality, have a large embedding capacity, and are able to be undetected using forensic methods. The proposed method got better performance rather than the previous method because PSNR and SSIM values are high, secret data can be received back as long as the pixel value doesn't change, and the size of the embedding capacity. The proposed method has more ability to embed various types of payload/ secret data because of the way it works, which splits byte files into binary. The proposed method also has the ability not to be detected when forensic image testing is carried out