K out of N secret sharing scheme with steganography and authentication

Abstract

With communication, preservation and processing of information becoming digital, security of such transactions is a matter of prime concern. This has resulted in the development of encryption and cryptography. The degree of security of confidential data is measured by the involvement of one or more people—at times security is guaranteed when a single hand is involved, while at others secrets kept in parts by many ensures security. This has given rise to secret sharing that has emerged as a hot area of research in computer science in the past decade. Existing schemes of secret sharing suffer from pixel expansion and degradation in visual quality of the recovered secret and cover images. This paper aims to develop a steganography and authenticated image sharing (SAIS) scheme for gray and color images with meaningful shares and the authentication ability to detect the manipulation of shadow images. The main features of this scheme is the use of simple Boolean and arithmetic operations and thus the computational complexity is reduced from O(nlog2n) to O(n).