Block Based Symmetry Key Visual Cryptography

Visual cryptography is a method for protecting image-based secrets that has a computation-free decoding process. In this technique, numbers of shares have been generated from one image. The shares are sent through any channel to the receiver and the receiver can again produce original image by stacking all the shares in proper order. But, this method wastes a lot of bandwidth of the network. The techniques of generating shares have been used in several existing methods which are not unique. The different methods have been used in different types of images like binary, gray and color images. In this paper, a block based symmetry key visual cryptography algorithm has been proposed to convert image in encrypted form and decrypt the encrypted image into original form. The symmetric key has been generated from a real number. The encryption and decryption algorithm have been designed based on symmetry key. The algorithm with key has been used to encrypt image into single share and decrypt the single share into original image. The real number has been used to form the key may be predefined or may be sent by secure channel to the receiver. The proposed algorithm can be applied to any type images i.e. binary, gray scale and color images. A comparison has been made of the proposed algorithm with different existing algorithms like Ceaser cipher, transpose of matrix, bit comp, and transposition cipher based on the performance. The pixels distributed in original and share images have also been tested. Finally, it has shown that breaking of security level of proposed algorithm i.e. to guess the real number is huge time consuming.