Multi-secret image sharing using the random image and Boolean operations

Abstract: The sharing of personal information and private data via the Internet has increased exponentially, making it essential to protect data from unauthorized access. Numerous cryptographic techniques are used to provide data security, but these techniques have limitations and require encryption and decryption techniques with a high computation cost. To secure shared information, covert information exchange techniques have been proposed, but these schemes have high computational complexity, making them difficult to share. This paper discusses cryptographic techniques for encrypting and decrypting secrets that provide security for images transmitted over a network. In recent research, n secret images are shared among n or n+1 shared images, which poses a problem because fragmentary secret information can be reconstructed from n-1 or fewer shared images. In this paper, the proposed method employs random image and Boolean arithmetic to circumvent this issue. In this paper, we first generated n random images using the random image and XOR operation. Shared images are generated by applying XOR on random images in a sequence. This method assures that secret images cannot be reconstructed until all shared images are available.

Keywords: Pixel permutation, Secret image sharing, Random Image, Cryptography, Information sharing.