High-efficiency quantum steganography based on the tensor product of Bell states

In this paper, we first propose a hidden rule among the secure message, the initial tensor product of two Bell states and the final tensor product when respectively applying local unitary transformations to the first particle of the two initial Bell states, and then present a high-efficiency quantum steganography protocol under the control of the hidden rule. In the proposed quantum steganography scheme, a hidden channel is established to transfer a secret message within any quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) scheme that is based on 2-level quantum states and unitary transformations. The secret message hiding/unhiding process is linked with the QSDC process only by unitary transformations. To accurately describe the capacity of a steganography scheme, a quantitative measure, named embedding efficiency, is introduced in this paper. The performance analysis shows that the proposed steganography scheme achieves a high efficiency as well as a good imperceptibility. Moreover, it is shown that this scheme can resist all serious attacks including the intercept-resend attack, measurement-resend attack, auxiliary particle attack and even the Denial of Service attack. To improve the efficiency of the proposed scheme, the hidden rule is extended based on the tensor product of multiple Bell states.