SEGMENT BASED VISUAL CRYPTOGRAPHY FOR KEY DISTRIBUTION

Security is playing a vital role in this era of information technology, it has become a prerequisite in the digital world for maintaining the secrecy of the information. Many techniques have been proposed for handling textual data, maintenance of confidentiality of pictographic data is also becoming a priority. The trend of pictographic data hiding is pixel based, here a version of Visual Cryptography is presented which is segment-based instead of pixel based. The key or the secret which is in the form of digits that is to be distributed is converted into segment display and then encrypted .The result of encryption is two random shares. The decryption process involves the stacking of these two shares. It is easier to view the secret with the human eye by stacking the shares.