IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September 2018 - 41

additional advantage to the user by capturing the attacker.
The attacker considers n recovered images to be output and
follows his/her wrong intuition. The experimental results
demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure at both levels
and altering any of the n shares will not reveal even a portion
of secret information. To check the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, which works efficiently for grayscale and color
images, correlation, mean-square error (MSE), and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) techniques were used.

One can find data-hiding
techniques in various daily life
applications like in digital bank
transactions, user authentication,
securing the cloud, and securing
sensitive and highly classified data.

DATA-HIDING TECHNIQUES
The 21st century is an era of digitalization. Day by day, the
use of digital media for communication increases, thereby
expanding the need for effective security measures. Various
data-hiding techniques have been created to meet this challenge [1]. One can find data-hiding techniques in various
daily life applications [2] like in digital bank transactions,
user authentication, securing the cloud, and securing sensitive
and highly classified data. Some of the data-hiding methods
are watermarking, steganography, and cryptography. These
techniques have inherent flaws, e.g., in watermarking, the
separation of noise-tolerant signals from digital media becomes
impossible for the user. Likewise, steganography fails to
recover unaltered data at the receiver side. Therefore, to overcome these barriers, cryptography is used. But the downside
of this technique is the effort associated with securing the
key. What happens if an unauthorized person gets access to
the key? He or she can easily crack the cipher and reveal the
message. To overcome this flaw and enhance this technique,
the advancement of cryptography was introduced, known as
visual cryptography. Visual cryptography was introduced in
[3]. It is used to hide data in such a way that when the shared
images are stacked together, only then does it reveal the hidden data. But tampering with shared images iteratively may
sometimes reveal partial information to an attacker. The
aforementioned discussed data-hiding techniques have no
defense for this issue.
A good data-hiding technique must not only provide
effective security protection from an intruder but should also
mislead him or her toward the wrong path. This ensures that
there will be no further attacks from that intruder. The proposed scheme provides extra security by using a secret-sharing scheme and steganography, and it also deceives the
attacker. To achieve improved security from attackers, we
have introduced two levels. In both levels, we used the basic
principles of a secret-sharing scheme and steganography for
the encryption and decryption processes. The output of the
first level tricks the attacker, while the output of the second
level deciphers the encrypted secret data. Some of the applications of the proposed method are shown in Figure 1.

STATE-OF-ART IN IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY
Data security has been an issue since the beginning of the
digital era, and researchers have considered many ways to
approach it. Visual secret sharing is a method that has risen in
popularity with the increased use of digital media. Numerous

articles have been published exploring the possibility of steganography and secret sharing as a solution for data security.
Some researchers have suggested the concept of least-significant bit modification and the secret key, while others advocate the encryption of secret images into shared images by
using random grids [4]. In [5], (n, n) and (t, n) secret-sharing
schemes are discussed. In (n, n) schemes, n shares are generated and distributed among n participants. If these n shares
are combined, only n secrets can be obtained. The same concept is used in (t, n) [6], the only difference being that any t
or more shares are required to reveal the secret. Many of
these schemes fail to provide adequate security, like when
some partial information is revealed when less than desired
shares are combined [7]. To overcome this flaw, many schemes
are proposed to hide the secret image. In [9], a secure scheme
has been proposed using the concept of steganography with
visual secret sharing. The idea behind this scheme is that no
fake shadows can pass the authentication mechanism, which
will provide authenticity so that no other member can gain
access. The major flaw in this scheme is that, on stacking any
t images, the secret is revealed, and no encryption is done on
the cover images, which makes an attacker's job of decrypting the information easy. In [10], a secure scheme is discussed,
the introduction of false data with true data, so that an attacker can not interpret which data is genuine and which is not.
This scheme uses an additive modulo operator, which is faster than the conventional XOR operation. This secure scheme
does not provide any security to the cover image, which
makes it easy for an attacker to apply cryptanalysis on a
cover image and get the secret.

PROPOSED METHOD
New approaches are always necessary to overcome the flaws
of previous approaches. As a result, new schemes, some of
which are related to steganography and others to secret sharing have been introduced. These schemes are less secure, as
only a single technique is used. Because of this, an intruder
can repeatedly try to reveal the secret by continuously tampering with shared information. The proposed strategy incorporated both secret sharing and steganography.
The proposed method used the concept of a secretsharing scheme to encrypt a secret image SI with n cover
images C i, i = 1, 2, f, n, to produce n + 1 shared images S j
j = 1, 2, f, n, n + 1. The same concept was used to decrypt
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