Authenticating Visual Cryptography Shares Using 2D Barcodes

One of the problems pertinent with many visual cryptography (VC) schemes is that of authentication. VC provides a way of sharing secrets between a number of participants. The secrets are in the form of an image that is encoded into multiple pieces known as shares. When these shares are physically superimposed, the secret can be instantly observed. A known problem is that of authentication. How is it possible to know that the secret being recovered is genuine? There has been some work devoted to this using so called cheating prevention schemes which attempt to provide a means of traceability or authentication via a set of additional shares that are used to check authenticity. This paper proposes a scheme that attempts to alleviate this suspicion by using 2D barcodes as a means of authentication which may have more practicality in terms of real world usage. Results are provided using an application that is available on mobile devices for portable barcode reading.