Quantum Steganography over Noiseless Channels: Achievability and Bounds

TL;DR

This paper develops a quantum steganography method that encodes secret messages into error syndromes, achieving optimal communication rates over noiseless channels that simulate noisy ones, with proven bounds matching the achievable rates.

Contribution

It introduces an explicit quantum steganographic encoding scheme for noiseless channels that emulates noisy channels, establishing capacity bounds and demonstrating their achievability.

Findings

Achievable steganographic rates match upper bounds.

Encoding simulates noisy channels within noiseless ones.

Defines secrecy and reliability for quantum steganography.

Abstract

Quantum steganography is the study of hiding secret quantum information by encoding it into what an eavesdropper would perceive as an innocent-looking message. Here we study an explicit steganographic encoding for Alice to hide her secret message in the syndromes of an error-correcting code, so that the encoding simulates a given noisy quantum channel. We calculate achievable rates of steganographic communication over noiseless quantum channels using this encoding. We give definitions of secrecy and reliability for the communication process, and with these assumptions derive upper bounds on the amount of steganographic communication possible, and show that these bounds match the communication rates achieved with our encoding. This gives a steganographic capacity for a noiseless channel emulating a given noisy channel.