Preventing Cheating in Computational Visual Cryptography

Visual Cryptography (VC) has drawn much attention for providing the service of secret communication. Basically, VC is the process of encoding a secret into several meaningless shares and later decoding the secret by superimposing all or some of the shares without any computation involved. VC has been adopted to support some practical applications, such as image authentication, visual authentication, image hiding, and digital watermarking. Unfortunately, in many applications, VC has been shown to suffer from the "cheating problem" in which the disclosed secret image may be altered by malicious insiders who are called "cheaters." While ubiquitous computing has been well developed, it has recently occurred to people in both academia and industry that research could benefit more from computational VC by introducing light-weight computation costs in the decoding phase. In this paper, a simple scheme is proposed to conquer the cheating problem by facilitating the capability of share authentication. It is worthwhile to note that the proposed scheme can identify for certain whether cheating attacks have occurred or not, while other schemes that have the same objective frequently provide a vague answer. In addition, the proposed scheme effectively addresses the two main problems of VC, i.e., the inconvenience of meaningless share management and the challenge of achieving difficult alignment.