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Security enhancement of an (n, n) threshold non-expansible XOR-based visual cryptography with unique meaningful shares

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Abstract

More and more visual cryptography (VC) schemes have been engaged by introducing computational operations, such as XOR, in the secret decoding phase. To our best knowledge, Singh et al.’s scheme is the very first attempt to present an XOR-based VC scheme with the goals of both unique meaningful shares and perfect secret reconstruction. Thus, it’s worthwhile to further examine and enhance the security of Singh et al.’s scheme. This paper highlights shortcomings in Singh et al.’s XOR-based VC scheme, including the risk of revealing the secret via a single share and the absence of an (n,n) case. The paper also presents security enhancements. In addition, the related experiments are conducted to ensure the validity of the algorithms in Singh et al.’s scheme.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan under Grant MOST 110-2221-E-415-006-MY2, and in part by the National Science and Technology Council of Taiwan under Grant NSTC 112-2221-E-415-005.

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The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

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Correspondence to Tzung-Her Chen.

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Wu, XW., Chen, TH. Security enhancement of an (n, n) threshold non-expansible XOR-based visual cryptography with unique meaningful shares. Multimed Tools Appl 83, 28913–28926 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-16657-3

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