Secure image encryption based on a cube

With the explosive growth of internet and the fast communication techniques available in recent years, the security and confidentiality of the sensitive data has become of supreme importance and concern. In order to protect this data from tampering and unauthorized access various methods for data hiding in cryptography and steganography have been developed and are in practice today. Steganography hides messages inside a carrier media. Cryptography, on the other hand obscures the content of the message. Visual cryptography, a Secret sharing Scheme, is a new technique which provides information security on digital information by distributing the secret information into many shares. The approach is simple unlike the complex, computationally intensive techniques used in traditional cryptography. Decryption can be performed by simply stacking the shares together and by interpreting it using the Human Visual System (HVS) without the involvement of any computational machines. An attempt has been made to extend the simple (2-2) secret sharing scheme based on Random Grids Visual Secret Sharing Scheme for authentication into a cuboid representation where each share represents a face of the cube. The representation also increases the carrying capacity of a system. Each face (share) of a cube is fragmented into a collection of randomly scrambled sub-blocks. The respective blocks are embedded into a carrier image to hide its existence by using a stenographic technique. The final information is revealed by overlapping the two shadows/shares containing the sub-blocks with the correct index. © 2016 SERSC.