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. 2024 Sep 6;19(9):e0308265.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0308265. eCollection 2024.

Image steganography without embedding by carrier secret information for secure communication in networks

Yangwen Zhang  1   2 , Yuling Chen  1   2 , Hui Dou  1   2 , Chaoyue Tan  1 , Yun Luo  1 , Haiwei Sang  3
Affiliations

Image steganography without embedding by carrier secret information for secure communication in networks

Yangwen Zhang et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Steganography, the use of algorithms to embed secret information in a carrier image, is widely used in the field of information transmission, but steganalysis tools built using traditional steganographic algorithms can easily identify them. Steganography without embedding (SWE) can effectively resist detection by steganography analysis tools by mapping noise onto secret information and generating secret images from secret noise. However, most SWE still have problems with the small capacity of steganographic data and the difficulty of extracting the data. Based on the above problems, this paper proposes image steganography without embedding carrier secret information. The objective of this approach is to enhance the capacity of secret information and the accuracy of secret information extraction for the purpose of improving the performance of security network communication. The proposed technique exploits the carrier characteristics to generate the carrier secret tensor, which improves the accuracy of information extraction while ensuring the accuracy of secret information extraction. Furthermore, the Wasserstein distance is employed as a constraint for the discriminator, and weight clipping is introduced to enhance the secret information capacity and extraction accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the data extraction accuracy by 10.03% at the capacity of 2304 bits, which verifies the effectiveness and universality of the method. The research presented here introduces a new intelligent information steganography secure communication model for secure communication in networks, which can improve the information capacity and extraction accuracy of image steganography without embedding.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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