Steganographic information hiding via symmetric numerical semigroups

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel steganographic method that embeds information into the gap structure of symmetric numerical semigroups, leveraging their properties for secure and statistically indistinguishable covert communication.

Contribution

It introduces a new number-theoretic primitive for steganography based on symmetric numerical semigroups and analyzes its security rooted in the hardness of membership inference.

Findings

Embedding into symmetric semigroups ensures statistical indistinguishability.

The scheme offers post-quantum resilience due to its number-theoretic basis.

Security relies on the hardness of numerical semigroup membership inference.

Abstract

We introduce a steganographic information hiding scheme based on structural properties of numerical semigroups arising from the Frobenius coin problem. Instead of encoding data through representable integers, the proposed protocol embeds information into the gap structure of carefully chosen symmetric numerical semigroups. Symmetry guarantees a balanced gap density, ensuring that encoded values are statistically indistinguishable from uniform numerical noise to an observer lacking the private generating set. The security of the scheme relies on the assumed average-case hardness of numerical semigroup membership inference for hidden generators, offering a novel number-theoretic primitive for covert communication and post-quantum resilient information hiding.