This paper presents a document protection scheme that integrates secret sharing and steganography. The secret document is divided into n shares based on a k-1 degree polynomial, and the sharing scheme is tied in with a cover document. With the corresponding cover document, we can recover the secret by gathering at least k shares. To ensure each share is distinct, this work designs a method to avoid duplicate arguments of the polynomial. The security in the proposed scheme comes from two sides, secret sharing and steganography. The cover document is not restricted to the secret, hence our scheme is more flexible in choosing the cover document compared to other researchers' schemes. Besides, the proposed scheme is easy to implement a hierarchical right management. Finally, experimental results and computational and security analysis are given to show that the proposed scheme is secure and practical. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
