Boolean operations-based visual secret sharing for general access structures

Abstract

Compared to conventional visual secret sharing (VSS), Boolean operations-based VSS solves the problems of the large pixel expansion (pe) and the complex computation involved in the decryption process. However, the existing VSS schemes based on Boolean operations are limited only to (2, n), (n, n) and (k, n). In this paper, we propose a Boolean operations-based VSS scheme for general access structures. The proposed scheme encodes the secret image into several shares such that the secret image can be reconstructed only by any qualified subset of the shares. The proposed scheme has lossless secret reconstruction with an acceptable pixel expansion (0 < pe < 1.5) and fast decoding process. The correctness of the proposed scheme is validated by formal security analysis and the experimental results.

Keywords:

• visual secret sharing
• visual cryptography
• boolean operations
• general access structure
• image encryption