3-Out-of-n Cheating Prevention Visual Cryptographic Schemes
Ching-Nung Yang
1
, Stelvio Cimato
2
, Jihi-Han Wu
1
and Song-Ruei Cai
1
1
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, Taiwan
2
Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli studi di Milano, Crema, Italy
Keywords: Visual Cryptography, Cheating, Deterministic Cheating, Cheating Prevention.
Abstract: In literature, (2, n) cheating prevention visual cryptographic schemes (CPVCSs) have been proposed,
dealing with the case of dishonest participants, called cheaters, who can collude together to force honest
participants to reconstruct a wrong secret. While (2, n)-CPVCSs resistant to deterministic cheating have
been presented, the problem of defining (k, n)-CPVCS for any k has not been solved. In this paper, we
discuss (3, n)-CPVCS, and propose three (3, n)-CPVCSs with different cheating prevention capabilities. To
show the effectiveness of the presented (3, n)-CPVCS, some experimental results are discussed as well.
1 INTRODUCTION
The cryptographic technique for the visual sharing
of secret images, denoted Visual Cryptography (VC)
or Visual Secret Sharing (VSS) was firstly proposed
in (Naor and Shamir, 1994). A VC scheme (VCS) is
usually implemented as a threshold (k, n) scheme,
where a secret image is decomposed into n shadow
images (called “shadows”) which are then
distributed to the n participants. Any set of k
participants is enabled to reconstruct the secret
image by simply stacking together the shadows they
own, while (k1) or fewer participants cannot obtain
any secret information. In a (k, n)-VCS, each pixel
of the secret image is “expanded” into m subpixels
in each shadow, where the value m is called the pixel
expansion. Following Naor and Shamir’s work, most
studies dealt with the pixel expansion of VCS
(Cimato et al., 2006; Ito et al., 1999; Kuwakado and
Tanaka, 2007; Wang et al., 2011; Yan et al., 2015;
Yang, 2004).
A (k, n)-VCS usually consider honest
participants, who can provide correct shadows
during the reconstruction phase. However, cheating
behaviour occurs in VCS, when some dishonest
participants, called cheaters, collude together to
forge shadows and force honest participants to
reconstruct a wrong secret. Several methods (Horng
et al., 2006; Hu and Tzeng, 2007; De Prisco and De
Santis, 2009; Hu and Tzeng, 2007; Liu et al, 2011;
Tsai et al., 2007) have been proposed to face the
cheating problem. In (Horng et al., 2006), the
problem of (n1)-colluder cheating has been defined
and a (2, n) cheating prevention VCS (CPVCS) has
been proposed by using (2, n+l)-VCS instead of (2,
n)-VCS. Horng’s (2, n)-CPVCS makes (n1)
collusive cheaters harder to predict the structure of
the honest participant’s shadow, and is immune to
deterministic cheating. However, Horng’s (2, n)-
CPVCS only prevents deterministic cheating for the
black secret pixel. De Prisco and De Santis in (De
Prisco and De Santis, 2009) extend Horng et al.’s
work and propose a new (2, n)-CPVCS, which does
not allow deterministic cheating for both black and
white colors. A (k, n)-CPVCS for any k still remains
unsolved.
In this paper, we study the (n1)-colluder
cheating problem in (k, n)-CPVCS for k=3. Our (3,
n)-CPVC
S can prevent deterministic cheating for
both black color and white color. The rest of the
paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces
(k,n)-VCS and reviews the previous (2, n)-CPVCSs.
In Section 3, we propose three (3, n)-CPVCSs with
different cheating prevention capabilities. Examples
in Section 4 are given to demonstrate the
effectiveness of our scheme. Conclusions are drawn
in Section 5.