#visual cryptography

Elliptic Curve Based Server Authentication System for Multi-Server Infrastructure-Crimson Publishers

AUGMENTED REALITY GLASSES like Google Glass have never had a stellar reputation among the privacy crowd. But a group of researchers believes that cyborg eyewear could actually offer a privacy upside in the form of a new kind of effortless encrypted communication—one where sensitive data is decrypted not on the screen of a vulnerable computer, but only in the eye of the recipient. Researchers at the University of North Carolina have developed an experimental system of so-called “visual cryptography” designed to communicate secret messages to the wearer of an augmented reality headset. In the system they created and tested, information is encrypted in what look like random collections of black and white static. But when the recipient’s augmented reality glasses overlay another random-seeming image over their vision, the two images combine to form a readable message. That system could, for instance, allow someone to unscramble encrypted text in a way that couldn’t be spied on by an over-the-shoulder snoop, since the text is never decrypted on the reader’s screen. Or it could be used to overlay a keypad with randomized numbers onto an ATM’s display, so that no one watching could learn the bank customer’s PIN as they typed it. “When you overlay the secret visual share, only you can see the final message,” says UNC researcher Sarah Andrabi, using the technical term “visual share” to refer to each of the two indecipherable images that add up to a message. “That secret is now only for the user’s eye.”