| Summary: | Advances in information technology have harnessed the application of Quick Response (QR) codes in day-to-day activities, simplifying information exchange. QR codes are witnessed almost everywhere, on consumables, newspapers, information bulletins, etc. The simplicity of QR code creation and ease of scanning with free software have tremendously influenced their wide usage, and since QR codes place information on an object they are a tool for the IoT. Many healthcare IoT applications are deployed with QR codes for data-labeling and quick transfer of clinical data for rapid diagnosis. However, these codes can be duplicated and tampered with easily, attributed to open-source QR code generators and scanners. This paper presents a novel (n,n) secret-sharing scheme based on Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) for secured transfer of QR codes as multiple shares and their reconstruction with a regularized Super Resolution Convolutional Neural Network (SRCNN). This scheme is an alternative to the existing polynomial and visual cryptography-based schemes, exploiting NMF in part-based data representation and structural regularized SRCNN to capture the structural elements of the QR code in the super-resolved image. The experimental results and theoretical analyses show that the proposed method is a potential solution for secured exchange of QR codes with different error correction levels. The security of the proposed approach is evaluated with the difficulty in launching security attacks to recover and decode the secret QR code. The experimental results show that an adversary must try 258 additional combinations of shares and perform 3 × 288 additional computations, compared to a representative approach, to compromise the proposed system. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
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