3D-VMSS: Distributed Trust and Visually Meaningful Secret Sharing for 3D Mesh Models

As industrial systems increasingly rely on 3D mesh models to bridge the physical and digital domains, ensuring their secure and efficient management has become critical. While thumbnail-preserving encryption (TPE) has successfully balanced security and usability for 2D images, extending this concept to 3D models remains largely unexplored. In this work, a novel distributed trust and visually meaningful secret sharing scheme for 3D mesh models (3D-VMSS) is proposed. The distributed trust mechanism splits the model data among multiple participants, ensuring that no single party possesses sufficient information for reconstruction. The original model can only be reconstructed through collaboration among a predefined threshold of authenticated participants. This approach fundamentally differs from traditional single-key encryption by eliminating single points of failure and enabling flexible access control. The scheme segments vertex coordinates into hierarchical components and applies polynomial secret sharing to ensure confidentiality, generating visually meaningful shares that preserve recognizable geometric features while concealing sensitive details. To ensure integrity and resist collusion attacks, dual authentication mechanisms are incorporated. Furthermore, progressive reconstruction enables different quality levels based on participant collaboration. Experimental results demonstrate the scheme's effectiveness in balancing security and practical usability for distributed 3D model management.