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Experimental Implementation of Quantum Steganography Using Coherent States

Haley A. Weinstein, Bruno Avritzer, Todd A. Brun, Jonathan L. Habif

Published Jan 1, 2024• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We devise a system to measure the quantum density matrix of different noises and then control these noises to achieve positive rate covert communications. This is demonstrated for thermal noise in an optical communication link.
DOI
10.1364/cleo_at.2024.jw2a.224

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Steganography is an alternative to cryptography, where information is protected by secrecy (being disguised as innocent communication or noise) rather than being scrambled. In this work we develop schemes for steganographic communication using Fock and coherent states in optical channels based on disguising the communications as thermal noise, with a fidelity approaching 1. We derive bounds on their efficiency in terms of the communication rate and the required keyrate in the case of an all-powerful eavesdropper and provide explicit methods of encoding and error correction for the noiseless channel case.
Quantum steganography is a powerful method for information security where communications between a sender and receiver are disguised as naturally occurring noise in a channel. A candidate resource state required for implementing quantum steganography is a weak coherent state engineered with modulated phase and amplitude values drawn from probability distributions that result in a mixed state indistinguishable from a thermal state. We experimentally demonstrate construction of this resource state by encoding the phase and amplitude of weak coherent laser states such that a third party monitoring the communications channel, measuring the flow of optical states through the channel, would see an amalgamation of states indistinguishable from thermal noise light such as that from spontaneous emission. Using quantum state tomography, we experimentally reconstructed the density matrices for the artificially engineered thermal states and spontaneous emission from an optical amplifier and verified a mean state fidelityF=0.98F=0.98F=0.98when compared with theoretical thermal states.
We extend covert communication to the quantum regime by showing that covert quantum communication is possible over optical channels with noise arising either from the environment or from the sender's lab. In particular, we show that sequences of qubits can be transmitted covertly by using both a single photon and a coherent state encoding. We study the possibility of performing covert quantum key distribution (QKD) and show that positive key rates and covertness can be achieved simultaneously. Covert communication requires a secret key between the sender and receiver, which raises the problem of how this key can be regenerated covertly. We show that covert QKD consumes more secret bits than it can generate and propose instead a hybrid protocol for covert key regeneration that uses pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) together with covert QKD to regenerate secret keys. The security of the new key is guaranteed by QKD while the security of the covert communication is at least as strong as the security of the PRNG.