K out of N Secret Sharing Scheme for Multiple Color Images with Steganography and Authentication

With our lives trundling toward a fully-digital ecosystem in break-neck speed, today’s encryption and cryptography are facing the challenge of ensuring security and future-readiness of our transactions. When such transactions involve multiple hands, transmission of such data in discrete and recoverable parts (secret shares) guarantees confidentiality. This paper’s objective is to present a foolproof way of multiple secret sharing, eliminating issues such as half-toning and degradation of visual quality of the recovered images. This k out of n steganography and authenticated image sharing (SAIS) scheme for multiple color images generates n relevant shares with the ability to reconstruct the secret images using k shares and facility to find out any move for appropriation of share cover images. The key aspects of this proposed scheme is to use simple Boolean and arithmetic operations with reduction of computational complexity from O(nlog2n) to O(n) and to share multiple images without any pixel expansion.