A new hybrid asymmetric key-exchange and visual cryptographic algorithm for securing digital images

In today's cyber world where interception of data by third parties is very common, there is a demanding need for encryption of data via secured and unsecured communication networks. Sensitive digital images stored in databases, such as in the cloud, need to be encrypted. This paper proposed a hybrid method of encryption of digital images based on asymmetric encryption algorithm and a visual cryptographic algorithm. The encryption key used was based on a public key-exchange algorithm and the algorithm was implemented using MATLAB on an mxn image size.