The ISC International Journal of Information Security

Abstract This study presents a resilient and efficient architecture for securely distributing secrets to the public across untrusted networks. The proposed method integrates Shamir’s Verifiable Secret Sharing with AES-GCM encryption to provide strong confidentiality and authentication guarantees. Each share is reinforced with cryptographic hash-based signatures and imperceptibly embedded within cover images using a neural steganographic framework based on an Attention U-Net enhanced with transformer mechanisms and Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks, allowing the system to place data in visually insensitive regions adaptively. The training process leverages a joint perceptual and structural loss function, ensuring high visual fidelity while preserving critical image features for robust message recovery. Experimental evaluations demonstrate superior performance in Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio and Structural Similarity Index Measure, and a minimal Bit Error Rate across various distortions, including noise, blurring, and JPEG compression. Compared to existing methods, the framework provides enhanced protection against fraudulent participants or dealers, eliminates reliance on secure private channels, and enables the reuse of system components, offering a comprehensive solution for safe, verifiable secret sharing. 

Abstract This paper investigates digital data hiding schemes. The concept of information hiding will be explained at first, and its traits, requirements, and applications will be described subsequently. In order to design a digital data hiding system, one should first become familiar with the concepts and criteria of information hiding. Having knowledge about the host signal, which may be audio, image, or video and the final receiver, which is Human Auditory System (HAS) or Human Visual System (HVS), is also beneficial. For the speech/audio case, HAS will be briefly reviewed to find out how to make the most of its weaknesses for embedding as much data as possible. The same discussion also holds for the image watermarking. Although several audio and image data hiding schemes have been proposed so far, they can be divided into a few categories. Hence, conventional schemes along with their recently published extensions are introduced. Besides, a general comparison is made among these methods leading researchers/designers to choose the appropriate schemes based on their applications. Regarding the old scenario of the prisoner-warden and the evil intention of the warden to eavesdrop and/or destroy the data that Alice sends to Bob, there are both intentional and unintentional attacks to digital information hiding systems, which have the same effect based on our definition. These attacks can also be considered for testing the performance or benchmarking, of the watermarking algorithm. They are also known as steganalysis methods which will be discussed at the end of the paper.

Abstract The intriguing characteristics of chaotic maps have prompted researchers to use these sequences in watermarking systems to good effect. In this paper we aim to use a tent map to encrypt the binary logo to achieve a like-noise signal. This approach makes extraction of the watermark signal by potential attacker very hard. Embedding locations are selected based on certain principles. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed watermarking method is highly superior to other techniques reported in literature and readily achieves the desired robustness and security level.