Steganographic Secret Sharing With GAN-Based Face Synthesis and Morphing for Trustworthy Authentication in IoT

Trust and security are fundamental to the successful adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT). This paper proposes a secure message authentication scheme based on steganographic secret sharing for building trust in IoT systems. In our scheme, the message is split and distributed to two participants by a dealer, and it can be revealed only when the two authorized participants grant their consents. Neither of the participants can disclose the message without the consent of the other. To avoid malicious cyberattacks in IoT communications, each share of message is concealed in the form of a human face image, referred to as the shadow image, via a generative adversarial network (GAN). For each participant, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is trained to extract the share of message from the shadow image generated with the participant’s key. Distortions and alterations to the shadow images may occur during the transmission from the dealer to the participant. As a tamper-evident design, each shadow image is morphed with the participant’s source image under the participant’s customized morphing parameter. Cheater detection is also crucial for involved participants to identify fake shadow images during the secret retrieval process. As a cheating countermeasure, the shadow image for one participant is morphed with that for the other and then morphed further with the given source image. The proposed scheme enables multi-factor authentication in the sense that the message is protected by the keys, source images, and morphing parameters of two participants.