(3, 3) Visual Cryptography for Online Certificate Authentication

Today organizations face a challenge while recruiting candidates, who provide forged mark sheets in order to get a job. To prevent wrong hiring a detailed and thorough approach is needed to verify the authentication of both the candidate and the marks obtained by him/her. There are so many modern cryptographic protocols available which can be used for authenticating individual’s academic achievement certificates. Visual Cryptography is a simple and secure way to allow the secret sharing of images without any cryptographic computations or the use of encryption or decryption keys. The novelty of the visual secret sharing scheme is in its decryption process where human visual system (HVS) is employed for decryption of secret shares. In this paper we have discussed (3, 3) visual cryptography scheme which can be used to generate shares and distributes them among three parties, i.e. the Job Seeker, Certificate Issuance Authority and the Organization conducting Job interview. Secret message can be decrypted only if all the three shares are available. Every certificate carries a unique number which is encrypted using visual cryptography and without handshaking of all the parties it is impossible to decrypt, thus ensuring full proof authentication.