Securing QR Codes Using a Hybrid Pseudo Baker’s Mapped Cellular Automation

Since their advent in 1994, Quick Response (QR) codes have grown to become ubiquitous in wide-ranging applications covering marketing, healthcare, commerce, and many other areas. Increasingly, commerce, QR codes are taking up roles where confidentiality, privacy, and integrity of the information they transmit or and/or the identities of parties involved in the communication is vital. Meanwhile, cellular automation (CA) is veritable tool for abstract dynamical information processing with finite number of discrete states space, and time that can be updated synchronously contents and is steered. By employing a pseudo baker’s map, we design a template to scramble the QR code content whose evolution is steered using the dextral boundary condition (DBC) of cellular automation. The DBC combines a group of cells permeating contents of a QR code tile at state t to determine the left-most cell entry at state t+1. We evaluated our protocol by implementing both the encryption and recovery procedures on various QR codes, and our findings show that, our method can retain the physical appearance and heterogeneity of the QR code during both the encryption and decryption processes. This is manifest in 100% concordance between the original and recovered QR codes, which is better than what was reported in similar schemes.

1 Introduction

Quick Response (QR) codes have become important tools in marketing, commerce, healthcare, and many other areas of our lives. Oftentimes these innocuous binary grids serve as conduits to convey confidential information whose privacy and integrity must be safeguarded.