Abstract
A secret sharing scheme allows a secret to be shared among a set of participants, P, such that only authorized subsets of P can recover the secret, but any unauthorized subset cannot recover the secret. In 1995, Naor and Shamir proposed a variant of secret sharing, called visual cryptography, where the shares given to participants are xeroxed onto transparencies. If X is an authorized subset of P, then the participants in X can visually recover the secret image by stacking their transparencies together without performing any computation. In this paper, we address the issue of cheating by dishonest participants, called cheaters, in visual cryptography. The experimental results demonstrate that cheating is possible when the cheaters form a coalition in order to deceive honest participants. We also propose two simple cheating prevention visual cryptographic schemes.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Blakley G., Safeguarding Cryptographic Keys, Proc. AFIPS 1979 Natl. Conf. New York, Vol. 48 (1979) pp. 313–317.
E. F. Brickell D. R. Stinson (1991) ArticleTitleThe detection of cheaters in threshold schemes SIAM J. Disc. Math. 4 502–510 Occurrence Handle92f:94012
M. Carpenteri (1995) ArticleTitleA perfect threshold secret sharing scheme to identify cheaters Des. Codes Cryptogr. 5 183–187 Occurrence Handle1322813
C. C. Chang J. C. Chuang (2002) ArticleTitleAn image intellectual property protection scheme for gray-level image using visual secret sharing strategy Pattern Recogn. Lett. 23 931–941 Occurrence Handle1902170
C. C. Chang R. J. Hwang (1997) ArticleTitleEfficient cheater identification method for threshold schemes IEE Proc.-Comput. Digit. Technol. 144 23–27
M. Naor B. Pinkas (1997) Visual Authentication and Identification S. Kaliski Burton SuffixJr. (Eds) Advances in Cryptology—Proceedings of Crypto 97 Springer-Verlag New York 322–336
M. Naor A. Shamir (1995) Visual cryptography Alfredo Santis ParticleDe (Eds) Advances in Cryptology—Proceedings of Eurocypto 94 Springer-Verlag New York 1–12
W. Ogata K. Kurosawa (1996) Optimum secret sharing scheme secure against cheating Ueli M. Maurer (Eds) Advances in Cryptology—Proceedings of Eurocypto 96 Springer-Verlag New York 200–211
M. Rabin (1989) ArticleTitleEfficient dispersal of information for security, load balancing, and fault tolerance J. ACM 36 335–348 Occurrence Handle10.1145/62044.62050 Occurrence Handle0677.68024 Occurrence Handle91g:68034
A. Shamir (1979) ArticleTitleHow to share a secret Comm. ACM 22 612–613 Occurrence Handle10.1145/359168.359176 Occurrence Handle0414.94021 Occurrence Handle80g:94070
G. J. Simmons, An introduction to shared secret and/or shared control schemes and their applications, Contemporary Cryptology, IEEE Press, Piscataway (1991) pp. 491–497.
M. Tompa H. Woll (1988) ArticleTitleHow to share a secret with cheaters J. Cryptology 1 133–138 Occurrence Handle90c:68030
C. C. Wang S. C. Tai C. S. Yu (2000) ArticleTitleRepeating image watermarking technique by the visual cryptography IEICE Trans. Fundamentals E83-A 1589–1598
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Communicated by: P. Wild
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Horng, G., Chen, T. & Tsai, Ds. Cheating in Visual Cryptography. Des Codes Crypt 38, 219–236 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10623-005-6342-0
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10623-005-6342-0