A Secured One Time Password Authentication Technique using (3,3) Visual Cryptography Scheme

The world is vastly becoming a completely digital one with most transactions carried out over the internet. This has exposed the internet to increasing threats and attacks and has necessitated the need for an internet-based authentication and authorization services. One Time Passwords (OTP) have been introduced to overcome the limitations of static passwords. However, research has shown that OTP are not completely free from middle man attacks. This paper presents a (3, 3) Visual Cryptographic Scheme (VCS) technique for OTP security. The technique secures the generated OTP image by dividing it into three shares, of which one of the shares will be sent to the user while the remaining shares will be stored at different locations on the server. Before the original OTP image will be recovered, all the shares must the retrieved and stacked together. To avoid pixel expansion problem and loss of image quality that have characterized existing VCS technique, progressive visual cryptography was adopted to decrypt the retrieved OTP shares. A high quality OTP image was recovered as revealed by the peak signal to noise ratio values and there was no change in size of the OTP images.