STBCIoT: Securing the Transmission of Biometric Images in Customer IoT

The recent advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) and information technology has led to the rapid expansion of interconnectivity among a billion devices across various applications. The advent of massive data has resulted in greater computational dependence, posing obstacles to applying security policies in energy-sensitive devices. However, public-key-based encryption algorithms are impractical or impossible to execute on these resource-limited terminals. In this article, we propose a lightweight framework called securing the transmission of biometric images in customer IoT based on a visual cryptography (VC) scheme to achieve low-latency encryption for large-scale data like biometric images. To reduce noise in encryption, we utilize central recognition and gray-level features of QR codes to integrate the visually friendly feature of QR into VC. we further propose a high-quality image generation model with the halftoning effect of VC to improve the quality of decrypted images. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves high recognition performance on lossy decrypted images, effectively overcoming the performance limitations of traditional public key encryption methods for large-scale images.