Visual Cryptography and Its Applications

As technology progresses and as more and more personal data is digitized, there is even more of an emphasis required on data security today than there has ever been. Protecting this data in a safe and secure way which does not impede the access of an authorized authority is an immensely difficult and very interesting problem. Many attempts have been made to solve this problem within the cryptographic community.

In this book, one of these data security methods known as Visual Cryptography (VC) is presented. Specifically, visual cryptography allows effective and efficient secret sharing between a number of trusted parties. As with many cryptographic schemes, trust is the most difficult part. Visual cryptography provides a very powerful technique by which one secret can be distributed into two or more shares. When the shares are xeroxed onto transparencies and then superimposed exactly together, the original secret can be discovered without computer participation.