A cheating prevention scheme for binary visual cryptography with homogeneous secret images

In 1995, Naor and Shamir proposed the k-out-of-n visual cryptography scheme such that only more than or equal to k participants can visually recover the secret through superimposing their transparencies. Visual cryptography schemes have been extensively investigated since their invention and extended to numerous applications such as visual authentication and identification, steganography, and image encryption. In 2006, Horng et al. proposed that cheating is possible where some participants can deceive the remaining participants by delivering forged transparencies. Meanwhile, Horng et al. also proposed two cheating prevention schemes. One scheme, however, requires extra verification transparencies and the other needs larger transparencies. In other words, compared to visual cryptography, both schemes burden each participant with an additional problem of transparency management. In this paper, a more secure scheme is given to solve the cheating problem without extra burdens by adopting multiple distinct secret images. Moreover, for sharing these secret images simultaneously, the share construction method of visual cryptography is redesigned and extended by generic algorithms. Finally, the results of the experiment and security analysis show that not only the proposed scheme is more secure in comparison with the two previous cheating prevention schemes in the literature, but extra burdens are also eliminated.

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