Title: A QR code secret sharing scheme based on extended hamming code

Authors: Xuehua Cao; Xinwei Zhong; Genlin Ji

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Jiangyin Polytechnic College, Wuxi, 214405, China ' Department of Computer Science, Jiangyin Polytechnic College, Wuxi, 214405, China ' School of Computer and Electronic Information, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, 210023, China

Abstract: Secret sharing, as a crucial method for privacy protection, has seen rapid development in fields such as cloud computing and the Internet of Things in recent years. As a very popular information cover at present, QR code is used far more frequently than traditional images, so the application of secret sharing in QR code has highly promising. However, because the QR code is often presented in paper form, it is easy to be stained or damaged; At the same time, stego-QR codes may be tampered with by attackers during transmission. These issues will inevitably lead to bit errors in stego-QR code, and the existing research schemes are unable to recover the secret losslessly. To address this, this paper proposes a QR code secret sharing scheme based on Extended Hamming Code. This scheme not only ensures high embedding capacity but also implements error correction capability of stego-QR codes, which can accurately detect and correct bit errors in the stego-QR code, and then recover the secret. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of this scheme.

Keywords: secret sharing; QR code; bit errors; extended hamming code; error correction.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAACS.2026.152826

International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communications Systems, 2026 Vol.19 No.2, pp.221 - 235

Received: 18 Feb 2025
Accepted: 19 Mar 2025
Published online: 13 Apr 2026 *

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