Visual cryptography (VC), proposed by Naor and Shamir, has numerous applications, including visual authentication and identification, steganography, and image encryption. In 2006, Horng showed that cheating is possible in VC, where some participants can deceive the remaining participants by forged transparencies. Since then, designing cheating-prevention visual secret-sharing (CPVSS) schemes has been studied by many researchers. In this paper, we cryptanalyze the Hu–Tzeng CPVSS scheme and show that it is not cheating immune. We also outline an improvement that helps to overcome the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]