An efficient scheme for sharing secret information

In today's interconnected world, data hiding has emerged as a key technique for sharing secret information in the face of increasing cyber dangers and privacy concerns. By embedding sensitive information within harmless media, data hiding provides a strong solution that ensures secure transmission across untrusted networks while preserving the data’s confidentiality and integrity. In this paper, we propose a new method that hides the secret information in an image. The cover image is first enhanced by increasing its size and then it is divided into uniform blocks of size 3 × 3. A block contains corner pixels from the original cover image and the newly inserted pixels are assigned values as the average value of their neighbouring pixels. The central pixel of the block is assigned the average value of the corner pixels of the block. The corner pixels of a block hide two secret bits and remaining pixels hide one bit per pixel. All the pixels after hiding the confidential data are encrypted using the Paillier cryptosystem. Our proposed scheme can hide 2.49 bits in a pixel, which is better than the state of the art methods.