An improved visual cryptography with cheating prevention

Abstract

Visual cryptography was firstly proposed by Naor and Shamir in 1994, which has been extended into many applications, including image encryption, information hiding, visual authentication, and visual identification. One important security issue in visual cryptography is the cheating prevention. However, in 2006, Horng et al. introduced the cheating problem in visual cryptography, where some dishonest participants, cheaters, can deceive other participants, victims, using forged transparencies. Since that, many cheating prevention works have been done in this area. In this paper, we introduce a new cheating prevention scheme which is secure and more efficient than previous schemes. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.