Implementing Number Theory in Visual Cryptography for Secure Online Transactions using QR Codes

Abstract

In this modern world, due to the excessive availability of the Internet, it is extremely easy for people to communicate and share multimedia contents with each other. Moreover, Online Transactions has also been widely developed, in which secure means of data transfer play the major role. At the same time, secure transfer of personal and copyrighted data has become a critical issue. Visual cryptography (VC) is a useful tool for securing data (i.e. images, texts) that contain sensitive information. As a subset of secret sharing, VC has got importance for its security mechanism, which takes into account both image processing and cryptography. To achieve this goal, we manipulate quick response (QR) code as a container. QR codes generated by a certain system can carry its ordinary message in addition to the secure data. Anyone can read the message, but the secure data can only be obtained using a secret key. In this paper, a specified field of Mathematics, Number Theory is implemented in the concepts of VC for the secure online transactions which is achieved using QR codes.