A Secret JPEG Image Sharing Method Over GF(2^M) Galois Fields

With the rise of exchanges over the cloud and social networks, JPEG images have taken an important place in world image transmission and storage. In order to avoid security breaches and combat threats on the Internet, numerous JPEG image security methods have been proposed in both the academic and industrial communities. Encryption methods have been specifically designed to make JPEG images visually secure using so called crypto-compression methods. The drawback of crypto-compression is that it depends on only one secret key. Indeed, if this key is lost, so is the totality of the content of the secret original image. In this paper, we propose a secret JPEG image sharing approach. Shamir’s secret sharing scheme over Galois fields is used during the JPEG Huffman coding step, ensuring the visual security of the secret image in the compressed domain, while solving the issue of secret key loss. In addition, we also describe an eco-friendly scenario, dealing with a public shared JPEG image. In this scenario, we can obtain compressed shares because there is no need to duplicate the redundant information. According to our obtained results, our approach is fully format compliant and size preserving when compared to a standard JPEG compression of a secret original image, while ensuring the visual security of the content of the secret original image.