Author : Shobha Patil and V.R.Udupi

The advent of internet introduced to its users a new dimension as to how data can be shared from one part of the world to the other in near real time. However along with these opportunities came the challenges, such as, how to maintain the confidentiality of the data being transmitted. This gave a fillip to the already vibrant research area of cryptography. Encryption of images with the traditional encryption algorithms such as RSA, DES etc. But drawback of this approach is key management is difficult and keys for encryption are limited. This gave rise to a new area of research for encrypting images that is splitting an image at the pixel level into multiple shares (two or more), such that individually the shares convey no information about the image, but a qualified set of these shares will help to regenerate the original image. But drawback of this second approach is that is quality of the recovered image is poor. So to overcome these drawbacks propose a new approach that is encrypting the image without using any public or private keys. In this approach we are using sieving division shuffling algorithm to generate random shares. After decryption the quality of the recovered image is same as original image and low storage and bandwidth requirements needed.

Keywords: Visual Cryptography, image encryption, image decryption, Random shares, sieving, division shuffling, combining

Article published in the Proceedings of National Conference on ‘Women in Science & Engineering’ (NCWSE 2013), SDMCET Dharwad