Fake and Dishonest Participant Immune Secret Image Sharing

Secret image sharing (SIS) has received increased attention from the research community because of its usefulness in multiparty secure computing, access control, blockchain distributive storage and other security-oriented applications. Prevention of fake and dishonest participants is a key issue that has spurred interest in practical applications of SIS. Unfortunately, most previous SIS schemes failed to detect and locate fake or dishonest participants. In this article, an SIS for a (k, n)-threshold without pixel expansion is presented, which can detect and locate both fake and dishonest participants. Using a screening operation, the proposed approach fuses the benefits of polynomial-based SIS, visual cryptographic scheme (VCS), and hash functions to authenticate separate participants both with and without a dealer. In addition, the proposed approach achieves lossless rebuilding of the secret image. Analyses and experiments are conducted in this study to establish the effectiveness of the presented approach.