Multilayered information encryption scheme with fine-grained authentication

Secret communication has long been an import issue in recent years. To protect a secret, encryption is a general way to help owners encrypt the secret into meaningless information for non-owners in order to prevent secret leakage. Since fine-grained encryption provides more flexibility in information protection, it has drawn more attention in recent years, but effective methods are rare in this new research domain. In this study, a multilayered and authentication-enhanced scheme for information encryption was proposed, and its application was focused on image encryption. The scheme encrypts the whole or parts of a secret image according to its owners´ authorization. Owners of the image can also specify their own permissions encrypted in the image by embedding the corresponding authentication codes into the encrypted image. Later, the receivers can extract the hidden authentication codes to judge whether the decrypted image is fake or not. The experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed encryption scheme, and the conceptual framework can also be applied to other applications requiring information encryption.