Secure multimedia communication: advanced asymmetric key authentication with grayscale visual cryptography.

The secure authentication of user data is crucial in various sectors, including digital banking, medical applications and e-governance, especially for images. Secure communication protects against data tampering and forgery, thereby bolstering the foundation for informed decision-making, whether managing traffic, enhancing public safety, or monitoring environmental conditions. Conventional visual cryptographic protocols offer solutions, particularly for color images, though they grapple with challenges such as high computational demands and reliance on multiple cover images. Additionally, they often require third-party authorization to verify the image integrity. On the other hand, visual cryptography offers a streamlined approach. It divides images into shares, where each pixel represented uniquely, thus allowing visual decryption without complex computations. The optimized multi-tiered authentication protocol (OMTAP), which is integrated with the visual sharing scheme (VSS), takes secure image sharing to the next level. It reduces share count, prioritizes image fidelity and transmission security, and introduces the self-verification of decrypted image integrity through asymmetric key matrix generators, thus eliminating external validation. Rigorous testing has confirmed OMTAP's robustness and broad applicability, thereby ensuring that decrypted images maintain their quality with a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 40 dB and full integrity at the receiver's end.

Securing image-based document transmission in logistics and supply chain management through cheating-resistant visual cryptographic protocols.

In today's digital landscape, securing multimedia visual information-specifically color images-is of critical importance across a range of sectors, including the burgeoning fields of logistics and supply chain management. Traditional Visual Cryptography (VC) schemes lay the groundwork for encrypting visual data by fragmenting a secret image into multiple shares, thereby ensuring no single share divulges the secret. Nevertheless, VC faces challenges in ascertaining the integrity of reconstructed images, especially when shares are manipulated maliciously. Existing solutions often necessitate additional shares or a trusted third party for integrity verification, thereby adding complexity and potential security risks. This paper introduces a novel Cheating-Resistant Visual Cryptographic Protocol (CRVC) for Color Images that aims to address these limitations. Utilizing self-computational models, this enhanced protocol simplifies the integrated integrity verification process, eliminating the need for extra shares. A standout feature is its capability to securely transmit meaningful shares for color images without compromising the quality of the reconstructed image as the PSNR maintains to be ∞. Experimental findings substantiate the protocol's resilience against quality degradation and its effectiveness in verifying the authenticity of the reconstructed image. This innovative approach holds promise for a wide array of applications, notably in sectors requiring secure document transmission, such as Logistics and Supply Chain Management, E-Governance, Medical and Military Applications.