Secure Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images Using Cipher-Feedback Secret Sharing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-security reversible data hiding scheme in encrypted images using cipher-feedback secret sharing, enabling multiple data hiders to embed data securely while ensuring exact image recovery.

Contribution

It proposes a novel CFSS technique based on AES cipher-feedback and a threshold scheme for encrypted image sharing with improved security and reduced size.

Findings

High embedding rate achieved

Encrypted images are significantly smaller

Enhanced security against common attacks

Abstract

Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDH-EI) has attracted increasing attention, since it can protect the privacy of original images while the embedded data can be exactly extracted. Recently, some RDH-EI schemes with multiple data hiders have been proposed using secret sharing technique. However, these schemes protect the contents of the original images with lightweight security level. In this paper, we propose a high-security RDH-EI scheme with multiple data hiders. First, we introduce a cipher-feedback secret sharing (CFSS) technique. It follows the cryptography standards by introducing the cipher-feedback strategy of AES. Then, using the CFSS technique, we devise a new (r,n)-threshold (r<=n) RDH-EI scheme with multiple data hiders called CFSS-RDHEI. It can encrypt an original image into n encrypted images with reduced size using an encryption key and sends each encrypted image to one data hider. Each data hider can independently embed secret data into the encrypted image to obtain the corresponding marked encrypted image. The original image can be completely recovered from r marked encrypted images and the encryption key. Performance evaluations show that our CFSS-RDHEI scheme has high embedding rate and its generated encrypted images are much smaller, compared to existing secret sharing-based RDH-EI schemes. Security analysis demonstrates that it can achieve high security to defense some commonly used security attacks.