Visual Cryptography Based Multilevel Protection Scheme for Visualization of Network Security Situation

Abstract Visualization technology for network security situation adopts images to present the massive abstract data regarding network events. It reduces the workload of data analysis and benefits the manager to grasp the overall network status and trend. Secret information in the visual image requires confidentiality protection while transmitting. Comparing with some conventional methods realized by complicated encryptions such as DES and AES, we present a novel multilevel protection scheme based on visual cryptography (VC) with the beauty of decryption done only via the human eyes without using more computing devices. Essentially, a region incrementing VC scheme (RIVCS) is proposed in this paper dealing with the encoding of a secret situation image regarding network security. The secret image includes a number of regions, where each region is allocated with a certain secrecy level. Different secrecy levels can be decoded incrementally when different combinations of participants are gained. Firstly, we develop the model called the general AS (GAS) based RIVCS. Secondly, we design the algorithm for allocating secrecy levels. Thirdly, we construct the encoding matrices for sharing the secret pixels. Experimental results show that our method is more suitable to visualization data protection for network security situation with lower cost, higher reliability and richer application scenarios.