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The Security Defect of a Multi-pixel Encoding Method

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Information Security

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 7807))

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Abstract

A visual cryptography scheme (VCS) encodes a secret image into several share images, such that stacking sufficient number of shares will reveal the secret while insufficient number of shares provide no information about the secret. The beauty of VCS is that the secret can be decoded by human eyes without needing any cryptography knowledge nor any computation. Variance is first introduced by Hou et al. in 2005 to evaluate the visual quality of size invariant VCS. Liu et al. in 2012 thoroughly verified this idea and significantly improved the visual quality of previous size invariant VCSs. In this paper, we first point out the security defect of Hou et al.’s multi-pixel encoding method (MPEM) that if the secret image has simple contours, each single share will reveal the content of that secret image. Then we use variance to explain the above security defect.

This paper is previously posted on Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2012/315.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by 863 Program grant No. Y370071102, the “Strategic Priority Research Program” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences grant No. XDA06010701 and the “Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities” grant No. 3262015T20 (Topic: A new exploration of information research technology of Big Data environment, Project Leader: Yang LiangBin). Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science and Technology, University of International Relations, Beijing, 100091, China

    Teng Guo

  2. State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100093, China

    Feng Liu, ChuanKun Wu, YaWei Ren & Wen Wang

  3. Department of Information Management, Tamkang University, Taipei County, 251, Taiwan

    YoungChang Hou

  4. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    YaWei Ren & Wen Wang

  5. School of Information Management, Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing, 100192, China

    YaWei Ren

Authors
  1. Teng Guo
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  2. Feng Liu
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  3. ChuanKun Wu
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  4. YoungChang Hou
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  5. YaWei Ren
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  6. Wen Wang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Teng Guo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas, USA

    Yvo Desmedt

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Guo, T., Liu, F., Wu, C., Hou, Y., Ren, Y., Wang, W. (2015). The Security Defect of a Multi-pixel Encoding Method. In: Desmedt, Y. (eds) Information Security. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7807. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27659-5_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27659-5_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27658-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27659-5

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