Copyright © 2009 Mustafa Ulutas et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Protection of the sensitive data is an important issue because of the fast development of applications that need exchange of the secret information over the Internet. Secret sharing is an idea proposed by Shamir and Blakley separately with different implementations in 1979. Lin and Tsai proposed a method that uses Steganography to create meaningful shares by using Shamir's secret sharing scheme in 2004. In recent years, researchers work to remove some of the weaknesses of this method. However, all of these methods need cover images four times bigger than the secret image. This arises two problems: increased storage and bandwidth need for shares. We used cover images with the same size as the secret image by using both Blakley's secret sharing approach and Steganography. Therefore, we achieved reduced storage and transmission bandwidth for shares. Besides, the proposed method creates meaningful shares by using Steganography instead of noise-like shares, different from other studies that use Blakley's approach.