A QR ® Code Authentication Scheme for Signature Hiding

Abstract

Abstract The use of QR CODE to code to hide vital and confidential information and data ranging from the URL to online database and website, bio-data, name of an individual, password have been recently explored. However, not much research have been done in the area of image concealment in QR Code. In this study an effective SecSign_QRCode for signature hiding was developed. The study deployed the Base64 encoding system to convert the image signature to text format before convert to the QR Code. To incorporate an authentication scheme for a secure and privacy enhanced system the study adopted the hashing algorithm utilizing the SHA 256 algorithm. At the initial stage the user is required to input a password which would be used to generate a hash value. The hash value is thereafter combined and embedded with the Base 64 encoding to generate the SecSign_QRCode. On the other hand, the user is required to tender the password to be used for validation, this is then verified by passing it through the hash function and compared with the initial hash value. To measure the performance of the system the image signature from the resulting SecSign_QRCode the study utilized the image assessment metrics; MSE, PSNR, MAXERR, L2RATIO, CORRCOEFF. Experimental result from this study showed that the proposed system yielded an effective SecSign_QRCode with an average CORRCOEFF of 0.89141.