A Symmetric XOR-Based Dynamic Multiple Secret Sharing Visual Cryptography Framework

The increasing trend in the transmission of image-based data across various ecosystems like telemedicine, multimedia communication, Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud storage demands a strong security system that can withstand both classical and emerging computational threats. Classical cryptographic solutions require complex processing, and hence, meeting the real-time processing requirements is challenging. In contrast, visual cryptography (VC) provides a lightweight security solution. This study proposes a new XOR-based Dynamic Multiple Secret Sharing Visual Cryptography Scheme (XDMSSVCS) designed to share multiple binary image secrets with resistance to emerging computational threats. This work introduces a novel base share creation algorithm designed to generate statistically independent shares while maintaining the symmetric reconstruction property inherent in XOR-based visual cryptography. Also, a lightweight chaotic scrambling mechanism is integrated to address the information leakage problem during transmission. The experimental results indicate pixel-perfect reconstruction (MSE = 0, PSNR = ∞, SSIM = 1), near-ideal entropy, near-zero correlation between shares, high key sensitivity (10−14 variation leading to decorrelated outputs), and a large key space exceeding 2128, ensuring resistance against brute-force attacks. The framework also exhibits low computational overhead (XOR: ~0.90 ms, scrambling: ~383.72 ms, memory: ~15.58 MB), and strong resistance to attacks, establishing the XDMSSVCS as a secure and scalable framework for dynamic multi-secret sharing.