Thursday, June 10, 2010

Quantum Steganography

After two years of research Todd and I have finally submitted our work on quantum steganography. You can find the paper here. There's more to come in a month or so. I've reproduced the abstract from the arXiv website:

Steganography is the process of hiding secret information by embedding it in an "innocent" message. We present protocols for hiding quantum information in a codeword of a quantum error-correcting code passing through a channel. Using either a shared classical secret key or shared entanglement the sender (Alice) disguises her information as errors in the channel. The receiver (Bob) can retrieve the hidden information, but an eavesdropper (Eve) with the power to monitor the channel, but without the secret key, cannot distinguish the message from channel noise. We analyze how difficult it is for Eve to detect the presence of secret messages, and estimate rates of steganographic communication and secret key consumption for certain protocols.