Multi-secret image sharing based on elementary cellular automata with steganography

This paper presents a new Multi-Secret Image Sharing (MSIS) scheme with steganography, based on elementary cellular automata (ECA). A particular type of ECA, with behavior of generating some attractors which are called unary attractors, is used to share the secret images. The shares and the authentication strings, produced by a cryptographic hash function, are then embedded in color images using mod4-based operation in such a way that visual quality of stego are preserved as much as possible. The proposed scheme is verifiable as well, because a cryptographic hash function is used for secret images. Based on our experiments, the share images satisfy randomization which ensures the security of the proposed algorithm. Also, influence of similarity of some secret images is analyzed, the results ensures the completely deference between the shared images in the case of the similarity between two secret images. Moreover, the experimental results show that the embedded algorithm improves a good quality acceptable by a human eye of stego images. In addition, the proposed embedded algorithm has a good resistance against noise attack, and cropping attack. Compared with related secret sharing schemes, the proposed scheme provides most of desirable aspects such as verification, hiding shares, and also a linear computational complexity.