Multimode Approach of Data Encryption in Images Through Quantum Steganography

The information technology era or the third industrial revolution began around the 1960s; has changed the ways we live, work, and play; and brought substantial challenges that include loss of privacy, fake news, digital divides, and significant information security risks. With billions of connections and systems, security vulnerabilities are abundant including the opportunity for criminals to exploit any gaps that present themselves. Eventually, we'll need a groundbreaking technology to gain the upper hand against these threats. Protecting data, systems, and networks assumed a more specific term: cybersecurity. The goal of cybersecurity today is to protect information while it's at rest and in motion. One of the most interesting ways to deliver hidden information is through steganographic technique.

The protocols of quantum steganography

The purpose of this article is to present methods of modern quantum steganography and make a short review of different types of quantum steganography protocols.

Quantum steganography based on reflected gray code for color images

Digital steganography is the art and science of hiding information in covert channels, so as to conceal the information and prevent the detection of hidden messages. On the classic computer, the principle and method of digital steganography has been widely and deeply studied, and has been initially extended to the field of quantum computing. Quantum image steganography is a relatively active branch of quantum image processing, and the main strategy currently used is to modify the LSB of the cover image pixels. For the existing LSB-based quantum image steganography schemes, the embedding capacity is no more than 3 bits per pixel. Therefore, it is meaningful to study how to improve the embedding capacity of quantum image steganography. This work presents a novel steganography using reflected Gray code for color quantum images, and the embedding capacity of this scheme is up to 6 bits per pixel. In proposed scheme, the secret qubit sequence is considered as a sequence of 6-bit segments. For 6 bits in each segment, the first 3 bits are embedded into the second LSB of RGB channels of the cover image, and the remaining 3 bits are embedded into the LSB of RGB channels of the cover image using reflected-Gray code to determine the embedded bit from secret information. Following the transforming rule, the LSBs of stego-image are not always same as the secret bits and the differences are up to almost 50%. Experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme shows good performance and outperforms the previous ones currently found in the literature in terms of embedding capacity.