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Efficient QR code authentication mechanism based on Sudoku

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Abstract

QR code is an important means for delivering information which has been widely used in our daily life. As an ISO international standard, the QR code encoding and decoding process are disclosed publicly, thus it is easy to decode a QR code then forge a new QR code with the same QR code public message. It can lead to the problems of information forgery and ease the spreading of fake news. To overcome this weakness, we propose a simple and efficient QR code authentication mechanism to embed the authentication information in the padding region of QR code based on the characteristics of Sudoku and Reed-Solomon code. Different from the previous scheme, the proposed scheme embeds the authentication information without consuming the QR code error correction capacity and is able to achieve a higher embedding capacity. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme has high security, low power consumption and is robust to common QR code attacks.

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Funding

This study was funded by the NSFC (grant number 61672442 and grand number 61872436), the Fujian NSF (grant number 2016Y0079 and grand number 2016 J01327), the Quanzhou Science and Technology Plan Project (grant number 2017G030).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Xiamen University of Technology, Xiamen, China

    Peng-Cheng Huang

  2. Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan

    Peng-Cheng Huang, Chin-Chen Chang & Yanjun Liu

  3. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University, Taoyuan, Taiwan

    Yung-Hui Li

Authors
  1. Peng-Cheng Huang
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  2. Yung-Hui Li
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  3. Chin-Chen Chang
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  4. Yanjun Liu
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Correspondence to Chin-Chen Chang.

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Huang, PC., Li, YH., Chang, CC. et al. Efficient QR code authentication mechanism based on Sudoku. Multimed Tools Appl 78, 26023–26045 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-07795-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-07795-8

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