Reversible Information Hiding Considering Hierarchical Access Control

This paper proposes a reversible information hiding for supporting hierarchical control of access to embedded data. The proposed method firstly hides the most important information to an image by the reversible manner in which information is enciphered. To a stego image to which once information is hidden, this method embeds different information that is enciphered with a different key. In the proposed method, only one key corresponding to the most important data is managed, and other keys are generated from the managed key through a one-way hash function. The privileged user receives the managed key and he/she extracts and deciphers all hidden data, whereas the unprivileged user receives a key that for the least important data. The proposed method also has tamper detection ability. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.