Received November 7, 2020, accepted November 18, 2020, date of publication November 25, 2020,

date of current version December 9, 2020.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3040442

Quantum Steganography by Harnessing

Entanglement as a Degree of Freedom
MARIUS NAGY 1 AND NAYA NAGY 2
1 CybersecurityCenter, College of Computer Engineering and Science, Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University, Al-Khobar 31952, Saudi Arabia
2 College of Computer Science and IT, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Dammam 34212, Saudi Arabia

Corresponding author: Marius Nagy (mnagy@pmu.edu.sa)

ABSTRACT The ability of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer to distinguish between a photon with a well-
defined, independent quantum state and one that is part of an entangled pair opens the door for entanglement
to be harnessed as a degree of freedom of the photon and, consequently, to encode information into the
entanglement domain of an elementary particle. In this article, we propose a new idea for a quantum
steganographic technique that exploits the entanglement domain as a secondary way to represent information.
Thus, if photons are used as the physical support for encoding information, the cover data can be encoded
into the polarization domain, while the concealed data is embedded into the entanglement domain. The
scheme has clear advantages compared to previous quantum steganographic attempts in terms of efficiency,
versatility and practicability.

INDEX TERMS Entanglement as a degree of freedom, photon interferometry, quantum steganography,

quantum image representation.

I. INTRODUCTION different approaches when it comes to how to protect sensitive

Steganography is generally understood as the art of hiding
(or concealing) information by embedding it into innocent
looking data (or cover data). Although both steganography
and cryptography appear to perform a very similar function,
namely, transmitting secret information or messages, they
achieve this goal in fundamentally different ways. The phi-
losophy behind steganography is based on the idea of ‘‘hiding
in plain sight’’, that is, taking advantage of the unsuspicious
nature of the information being transmitted. This strategy
works particularly well if the amount of public information
circulating through the communication channel makes check-
ing everything for potentially harboring secret messages pro-
hibitively expensive.
While steganography’s focus is to draw as little attention as
possible on the carrier or cover data by finding clever patterns
to intermix the secret information within the structure of the
public data, cryptography, on the other hand, spends no effort
to make an encrypted message innocent-looking and blending
with the flow of other information. Cryptography’s focus is
to make the decrypting process as hard as possible for anyone
but the legitimate receiver of the message. Although they have
The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and
approving it for publication was Siddhartha Bhattacharyya
data, steganography and cryptography are not irreconcilable.
A hybrid approach is to use some cryptographic technique in
order to encode the hidden information first, before embed-
ding it into the public data.
Watermarking is a closely related field to steganography.
Primarily applied to images (although text documents can be
watermarked as well), watermarking superimposes a second
image, in the form of a logo or a copyright notice, over the
main image, such that direct copying of the original image
would still show its origin or owner. Note that, in this case,
the second image (or watermark) is usually visible. The fact
that the main image carries information embedded into it that
is visible and does not constitute secret information intended
to be communicated securely to another party are the distin-
guishing features of watermarking relative to steganography.
Otherwise, both techniques are concerned with embedding
some type of secondary information into the main data.
Given the important success quantum cryptography has
been enjoying ever since the field started back in the 1980s,
it comes as no surprise that researchers have tried to apply
the same quantum principles to steganography. Quantum
cryptography owns its flourishing development to two major
factors. The first is the nature of quantum mechanical princi-
. ples, such as superposition of states, entanglement, inherent

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 M. Nagy, N. Nagy: Quantum Steganography by Harnessing Entanglement as a Degree of Freedom
non-determinism, measurements and no-cloning principle,
which raise the level of security of quantum protocols
beyond what classical cryptography can achieve, guarantee-
ing unbreakability with the very laws of quantum mechanics.
The second major contributor to the success of quantum
cryptography is the practical side of its techniques and proto-
cols, most of which can easily be implemented with current
technology and do not have to wait until a full-scale quantum
computer is built.
Trying to capitalize on the same strengths that proved
essential for the ascension of quantum cryptography, some
researchers have started to devise steganographic or water-
marking schemes through quantum means [2], [3], [6], [8],
[9], [15]–[17], [21]–[23]. One of the most natural ways to
disguise sensitive information is to take advantage of the
particular characteristics of the communications channel,
especially the ones that are naturally occurring, like noise.
Indeed, many approaches to quantum steganography exploit
the idea of hiding messages in quantum data by disguising
it as deliberately inserted noise in a codeword of a quantum
error-correcting code [2], [16], [17], [23]. Mihara [16], [17]
also achieves a separation between the cover data and the
embedded secret message, such that embedding any secret
text does not modify the content of cover data. This is a fea-
ture that our quantum image steganography technique shares
as well: the same cover image can be used with any embedded
secondary image and a modification in one does not require
a change in the other. However, while our protocol is free of
any pre-conditions that need to be satisfied, Mihara requires
pre-shared entanglement between the communicating parties,
while other approaches, such as [2] use classical secret keys
to encode the secret data, even if quantum error-correcting
codes are employed.
Although, in general, both the cover data and the concealed
data can take any form (text, image, sound, video, etc.),
most steganographic procedures focus on hiding information
within images. In this respect, the quantum image represen-
tation needed in a steganographic scheme is either a Qubit
Lattice [14], [25], [26], which mirrors the structure of a digital
image, or more economical alternatives that employ expo-
nentially fewer qubits by manipulating large superposition
states [1], [10]–[13], [24], [27], [28], but which suffer from
the measurement bottleneck problem [19].
For quantum steganographic approaches specifically
designed to work with digital images, the Least Significant
Bit (LSB) technique remains the most popular one, even in
a quantum context [3], [8], [9]. Our approach also employs
a variation of this technique, sacrificing several of the least
significant bits in the gray level representation of a pixel
in order to allocate more resources to the most significant
bits and thus, improving the quality of the recovered hidden
image. This is in contrast to the standard LSB technique,
in which the quality of the cover image is reduced (even if
imperceptibly to the human eye) by using one or more of the
least significant bits to encode the secret data at the expense of
the cover image. No degradation whatsoever in the quality of
213672
the carrier image is present in our quantum steganographic
procedure due to the fact that using a distinct degree of
freedom to encode the secret image ensures that the sacrificed
bits are not taken from the cover image representation.
In terms of the quantum image representation chosen
to support our steganographic procedure, we have opted
for a qubit lattice (or array) representation, in which each
bit in the digital image is encoded into a separate qubit.
We have thus avoided more pretentious encoding schemes
that only apparently use fewer qubits by speculating on the
theoretical advantages of large superposition states. Such
approaches to quantum image steganography, whether they
are based on Cartesian coordinates for pixels (NEQR [27])
used in [3], [8] or use quantum log-polar image representa-
tions (QUALPI [28]) to support image steganography [21],
do not openly acknowledge the problem they have to retrieve
an image from its quantum representation. Precisely because
the superpositions they employ have as many terms as there
are pixels in the digital image, it would take even more
copies of the quantum representation to be able to retrieve
all (or almost all) pixels in the image through measurements
(see [19] for a detailed analysis of this issue).
Regardless of the particular way the cover data (be it an
image or not) is represented quantum mechanically, all the
quantum steganographic proposals to date share the following
characteristic: in order to embed secret information in the
quantum cover data (image), additional resources (in the form
of qubits) have to be allocated beside the ones used for
the public information, or alternatively, some of the qubits
intended for the quantum image representation have to be
instead used to encode the secret information, at the expense
of the image quality. In this manuscript, we propose, for the
first time, a steganographic protocol that can reuse the qubits
that are the physical support of the cover data in order to
encode the secret information as well. This is possible due to a
double-encoding strategy, in which a primary degree of free-
dom of some particle (such as polarization of photons or spin
of electrons) is exploited together with its entanglement
degree of freedom in order to encode within the quantum
state of the same particle a bit of information which is part
of the cover image representation, as well as some amount
of secret information. The entanglement degree of freedom
that is central to our novel steganographic idea refers to a
particle’s property of being part of an entangled ensemble or
having its own well-defined, independent quantum state. The
proposed method is conceptually clean, harnessing different
domains to separate the carrier data from the secret embedded
data, is implementable with current technology, does not
require additional qubits for the secret information and can be
combined with cryptographic techniques to encode the secret
data, if necessary.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Next
section provides the details of how a Mach-Zehnder interfer-
ometer can be used to distinguish between a photon that is
part of an entangled pair and a single, standalone photon.
In Section 3, we show how solving this distinguishability
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M. Nagy, N. Nagy: Quantum Steganography by Harnessing Entanglement as a Degree of Freedom
FIGURE 1. Mach-Zehnder interferometer.
problem lays out the foundation for encoding informa-
tion in the entanglement degree of freedom of a particle.
Section 4 puts forward our novel quantum image steganogra-
phy scheme employing both the entanglement and the polar-
ization degrees of freedom of a photon to embed a hidden
image into a non-secret one. A security analysis of our novel
steganographic technique is performed in Section 5, followed
in Section 6 by a discussion of the advantages of our pro-
posed scheme in the context of previous attempts at quantum
steganography. The manuscript closes with a few conclusions
formulated in Section 7.
II. DETECTING ENTANGLEMENT THROUGH
INTERFEROMETRY
Our quantum steganography scheme exploits the ability to
encode information in the entanglement domain by distin-
guishing between a photon that is part of an entangled pair
and a single, independent photon. This section explains in
detail how the two can be told apart with the help of single-
photon interferometry. Figure 1 depicts the typical arrange-
ment of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer.
The first Beam Splitter (BS1) reflects half of an incident
beam, redirecting it to the upper arm (U) of the interferometer,
and lets the other half pass through into the lower arm (L).
Technically, a beam splitter is a ‘‘half-silvered’’ mirror usu-
ally made up of some transparent material (such as glass) with
one semi-reflective side. Interestingly, and perhaps coun-
terintuitively, when a single photon hits the beam splitter,
quantum mechanics dictates that the photon is both reflected
into the upper arm and passes through into the lower arm
simultaneously. This behavior can be properly formalized by
modeling the beam splitter as a quantum operator described
by the following matrix:
 2iθ iθ 
1 e e
BS1 = √ iθ . (1)
2 e −1
This operator acts on the state space spanned by the two basis
vectors:
   
1 0
|Li = , |U i = , (2)
0 1
VOLUME 8, 2020
where |Li describes the state of a photon traversing the inter-
ferometer through the lower arm and |U i can be assimilated
with the state of a photon going through the upper arm of
the interferometer. According to this basis, a photon hitting
BS1 from below (not pictured in Figure 1) is simultaneously
reflected into the lower arm and refracted into the upper
arm. Quantum mechanically, this corresponds to a unitary
evolution from state |Li (incoming vertically from below
BS1) to an equal superposition of basis vectors |Li and |U i,
each with its own relative phase shift:
1
BS1|Li = √ (e2iθ |Li + eiθ |U i). (3)
2
In order to be reflected into the lower arm, the photon travels
an optical distance of 2δ through the material of the beam
splitter (see Figure 1) and in the process, its phase is shifted
by 2θ . Similarly, the component that goes through into the
upper arm travels only half that distance and, consequently,
acquires a phase shift of θ.
On the other hand, a photon that enters the Mach-Zehnder
interferometer horizontally, from the left side, is in the initial
state |ψ0 i = |U i. BS1 also transforms this state into a
superposition of basis vectors |Li and |U i, as follows:
1
|ψ1 i = BS1|ψ0 i = √ (eiθ |Li − |U i). (4)
2
The relative phase shift of θ for the |Li component is again
due to the optical path δ taken by the photon when it goes
through the semi-reflective surface of BS1 into the lower
arm. The other phase shift of eiπ = −1 is picked up by the
component reflected by BS1 into the upper arm. The reason
for this phase shift is that whenever a light beam is incident
on a surface and the material on the other side of the surface
has a higher index of refraction than the medium that the light
is traveling from, then the reflected light beam is shifted in its
phase by exactly one half a wavelength.
The purpose of the two mirrors (M) is to bring the two arms
of the interferometer together again and their effect can easily
be described through the following operator:
 
−1 0
M= = −I . (5)
0 −1
The mirror in each arm of the interferometer simply reflects
the incoming photon, while also shifting its phase by half a
wavelength since the mirror has a higher index of refraction
than the air.
1
|ψ2 i = M |ψ1 i = −I |ψ1 i = √ (|U i − eiθ |Li). (6)
2
Finally, the effect of the second beam splitter (BS2) is sim-
ilar to the way BS1 acts on the two basis vectors |Li and |U i,
producing balanced superpositions of them. But, because the
semi-reflective surface of BS2 is oriented downwards (see
Figure 1), the quantum operator associated with BS2 can be
obtained from the matrix describing BS1 by swapping both
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 M. Nagy, N. Nagy: Quantum Steganography by Harnessing Entanglement as a Degree of Freedom

its two rows and its two columns:

−1 eiθ
 
1
BS2 = √ iθ 2iθ . (7)
2 e e
Thus, a photon that reaches BS2 from the lower arm, is simul-
taneously reflected with a phase shift of π and goes through
with a phase shift of θ. Similarly, when a photon traveling
through the upper arm reaches BS2, it continues through
acquiring a phase shift of θ and at the same time it is reflected
when it hits the semi-reflective surface of BS2 and picks up
a phase of 2θ in accordance with the optical path traversed
through the material the beam splitter is made of. FIGURE 2. A pair of entangled photons, each subjected to its own
Having all the optical components of the Mach-Zehnder Mach-Zehnder interferometer.
interferometer precisely described, we can proceed to analyze
what happens to a single photon that enters the interferometer Note that the term |Li|U 0 i, which corresponds to the two
horizontally, from the left side. Mathematically, the state of photons continuing straight through their respective beam
the photon is transformed by successively applying quantum splitters, has a relative phase shift of 2θ, to account for the
operators BS1, M and BS2: optical path traversed by each of the two photons through the
|ψ3 i = BS2 · M · BS1|ψ0 i = BS2 · M |ψ1 i = BS2|ψ2 i material from which the beam splitters are manufactured.
The state of the ensemble after being reflected by the
−1 eiθ
 iθ 
1 2eiθ
   
1 1 −e
= √ iθ 2iθ ·√ = mirrors remains unchanged because each of the two photons
2 e e 2 1 2 0
has its phase shifted by eiπ = −1:
= eiθ |Li. (8)
|ψ2 i = (M ⊗ M )|ψ1 i = ((−I ) ⊗ (−I ))|ψ1 i
Equation 8 clearly shows that any photon entering a 1
Mach-Zehnder interferometer horizontally, from the left side, = √ (|U i|L 0 i + ei2θ |Li|U 0 i). (10)
2
will always end up exiting horizontally and will therefore be
detected by photon detector D1. This is due to the interference The final state of the ensemble, as each photon leaves its
that takes place at BS2, which destroys the vertical compo- own interferometer, is obtained by applying operator BS2 ⊗
nent |U i that would have caused D2 to trigger and reinforces BS1 on state |ψ2 i, since the first photon in the ensemble
the horizontal component |Li. (traversing the right-hand side interferometer) goes through
The interference effect described above is only possible if a beam splitter described mathematically by operator BS2
no information can be obtained about which way the photon before being detected by either D1 or D2, and similarly,
takes from BS1 to BS2. Any attempt to measure the location the second photon (going through the left-hand side inter-
of the photon, as being in the upper arm or in the lower arm, ferometer) is subjected to a beam splitter whose effect is
will inevitably destroy interference at BS2 and, consequently, modeled formally as operator BS1 before triggering detector
the photon will have equal chances of leaving the interferom- D3 or D4.
eter horizontally and being detected by D1, or vertically and 1
|ψ3 i = (BS2 ⊗ BS1) √ (|U i|L 0 i + ei2θ |Li|U 0 i)
ending up in D2. 2
Now let us turn our attention to the case where the photon 1 e |Li + e2iθ |U i e2iθ |L 0 i + eiθ |U 0 i
 iθ 
entering the interferometer is part of an entangled pair of = √ √ ⊗ √
2 2 2
photons, possibly created through spontaneous parametric
e2iθ −|Li + eiθ |U i eiθ |L 0 i − |U 0 i
 
down-conversion (SPDC) [4], [5], [20]. This process uses +√ √ ⊗ √
a non-linear crystal to generate a pair of photons that are 2 2 2
momentum and position entangled. Figure 2 depicts an exper- e2iθ
= √ (|Li|U 0 i + e2iθ |U i|L 0 i). (11)
imental setup in which each photon from an entangled pair is 2
going through its own Mach-Zehnder interferometer.
The first observation we can formulate, based on state
Momentum conservation laws are responsible for the cor-
|ψ3 i, is that the two photons remain entangled even after
relations exhibited by the two particles in the entangled
leaving the experimental setup depicted in Figure 2. Their
ensemble, if their position through the corresponding inter-
conjugate properties are expressed in the simultaneous trig-
ferometer is to be observed. Thus, the two photons are
gering of detectors D1 and D3, respectively D2 and D4.
either both reflected by the first beam splitter they each
In other words, both photons exit the experimental apparatus
encounter, or they are both refracted, passing through the
horizontally or both vertically. However, this correlation is
glass material of the beam splitter. This position entangled
only apparent to an observer that has access to both inter-
state of the ensemble can be expressed formally as follows:
ferometers. If we follow the behavior of any one of the
1 two photons, there is an equal probability that it will exit
|ψ1 i = √ (|U i|L 0 i + ei2θ |Li|U 0 i). (9)
2 the interferometer horizontally or vertically. This behavior is
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M. Nagy, N. Nagy: Quantum Steganography by Harnessing Entanglement as a Degree of Freedom
different from the previous scenario, in which a single photon
entering a Mach-Zehnder interferometer horizontally always
exits the device in the same way (horizontally).
In the case of the two entangled photons, entanglement
acts as some sort of measurement on the position of a pho-
ton, destroying the interference brought about by the exper-
imental apparatus. Since it is possible, even theoretically,
to obtain information about which path a particular photon
took through the interferometer by observing the position
of its ‘‘twin’’, the correlations between the entangled pho-
tons amount to a measurement on the position of any of
the two photons, which ultimately leads to non-interference.
However, the difference in behavior between a photon that
is part of an entangled pair and a single, standalone photon
introduces a degree of freedom that can be harnessed for
various purposes.
III. CODING IN THE ENTANGLEMENT DOMAIN
Turning a photon (or, in general, any particle for which
position-entangled pairs can be generated) into physical sup-
port for encoding and transmitting information can be done
easily by distinguishing between a photon with a well-
defined, independent quantum state and a photon whose
quantum state can only be described as part of an entan-
gled pair. The tool to achieve this distinguishability is a
Mach-Zehnder interferometer, as we have seen in detail in
the previous section, or a similar device that can be used
to achieve interference of other elementary particles used as
physical support. Consequently, we can follow the convention
that a single, standalone photon always encodes the bit 0,
while a photon that was generated through SPDC, for exam-
ple, encodes a 1. Thus, depending on the physical process
that birthed the photon, we can encode information in the
entanglement domain.
In order to read the value of a bit encoded like this, we need
to pass the carrier photon through a Mach-Zehnder interfer-
ometer and observe which photon detector it will trigger.
A vertical exit, corresponding to a click registered by D2,
is equivalent to reading a 1 (entangled photon), because non-
entangled photons always exit the apparatus horizontally.
A click registered by D1, on the other hand, cannot be inter-
preted unambiguously. Assuming that, a priori, the photon
is equally likely to carry a 0 or a 1, when we see the pho-
ton exiting horizontally, there is a 2/3 probability the bit
carried is 0 and a 1/3 probability that the photon is part
of an entanglement and therefore, it carries a value of 1.
Because a value of 0 cannot always be reliably distinguished
from a 1, if the information is encoded in the entanglement
domain, it follows that the amount of information carried by
one particle is less than one bit. To be precise, the amount
of information that can be encoded by a single photon
is:
1 3 1 1 2 2 1 3 2
· 1+ (1−(− log − log )) = + (1+ − log 3)
4 4 3 3 3 3 4 4 3
≈ 0.31 (12)
VOLUME 8, 2020
This quantity can be pushed arbitrarily close to 1, by encoding
one bit over an arbitrary number of particles. For example,
assume that if we want to encode a 0, we prepare two inde-
pendent, standalone photons, while if we want to encode the
value 1 we generate two pairs of entangled photons, and
use one photon from each pair to represent the bit 1. In this
case, the amount of information carried by the two photons
increases to:
3 5 1 1 4 4 5 8
· 1 + (1 − (− log − log )) = 1 + ( − log 5)
8 8 5 5 5 5 8 5
≈ 0.55 (13)
Note in the above formula that in three out of eight cases
(when the photons are part of entangled pairs and at least
one exits the interferometer vertically) we know the encoded
bit is a 1. On the other hand, when both photons emerge
horizontally (event that happens in five out of eight cases),
there is still a 1/5 probability that they encode a 1. In general,
when one bit is encoded over a group of n photons, the amount
of information carried becomes:
2n − 1 2n + 1 2n
n+1
+ n+1 (1 + n · n − log (2n + 1))
2 2 2 +1
n + 1 log (2n + 1)
= − . (14)
2 2n+1
It is easy to check that, for all practical purposes,
9 or10 photons are enough to be able to distinguish between
a 0 and a 1 with very high probability. However, what
makes encoding in the entanglement domain appealing is
the fact that it can be used as a secondary degree of free-
dom to increase the amount of information that can be
stored/transmitted to more than one bit per particle. This
strategy can be used, for instance, to improve the efficiency
of quantum cryptographic protocols by exploiting the entan-
glement degree of freedom of a photon together with its
polarization [18]. In the next section, we show how the
same technique of double encoding in the polarization and
entanglement domains can be used to create a steganographic
algorithm with all the security benefits brought about by
quantum mechanics.
IV. QUANTUM STEGANOGRAPHY SCHEME
Although, in general, both the concealed and the host data
can take any format (text, audio, image, video, etc.), for con-
creteness, let us assume throughout this section that we intend
to hide an image B within a host image A. More precisely,
we wish to conceal the Lena image (Figure 4) within the
image of Figure 3.
Both images are composed of 512 × 512 pixels, with the
gray level of each pixel in the range [0..255] (encoded on
8 bits). Our quantum steganography scheme uses a qubit
lattice to represent both images (A and B) at the same time,
but using different degrees of freedom. Since each of the
two images can be thought of as a sequence of bits ai ,
respectively bi , with i = 0, 1, 2, . . . , 226 − 1, the quantum
image representation will require a sequence of photons φi
with the same length. Each photon φi will be responsible of
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 M. Nagy, N. Nagy: Quantum Steganography by Harnessing Entanglement as a Degree of Freedom
FIGURE 3. The host image A (512 × 512 × 8 bits grayscale image).
FIGURE 4. The concealed image B (512 × 512 × 8 bits grayscale image).
encoding the bit values ai and bi . Bit ai will be encoded in
the polarization domain, while bit bi will be encoded in the
entanglement domain. For this, an encoding basis has to be
chosen in order to formally describe the possible states in
each degree of freedom.
To encode a bit into the rectilinear polarization of a photon,
one can choose horizontal polarization |H i to encode a 0 and
vertical polarization |V i to encode a 1. As for the entangle-
ment degree of freedom, we can use a regular photon emitter
to generate a photon that encodes a 0 and the signal photon
from a spatially entangled paired generated using SPDC to
encode a 1. In practice, the value bi is encoded first, because
we need to generate the photon differently, depending on the
value bi encoded, and then we can use a polarizer on the
photon thus obtained to further encode the bit ai on the same
particle.
Note that in a classical steganographic approach, after the
hidden image is somehow embedded into the carrier image,
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FIGURE 5. Measuring a photon in both the entanglement and the
polarization domain.
some of the classical bits used in the representation of the
resulting image are actually encoding the secret image, while
the others are part of the cover image. This is not the case for
our quantum approach. The two images are simultaneously
encoded into two independent properties of photons (polar-
ization and entanglement) such that after the encoding phase,
all we have is a sequence or train of photons, where each
photon encodes both a bit from the cover image and a bit from
the hidden image.
In order to retrieve the values ai and bi from the state of
photon φi , we need to measure the photon in each of the
two bases used to encode the values ai and bi in the first
place. Figure 5 shows how these two measurements would
be accomplished in practice.
A measurement in the entanglement domain corresponds
to running the photon through a Mach-Zehnder interfer-
ometer in order to distinguish between a photon that is
part of an entangled pair and a single, standalone photon.
Section 2 describes this process in detail. As Figure 5 shows,
after the photon exits the interferometer, either horizon-
tally or vertically, a polarizer beam splitter is placed in its path
to further distinguish between a horizontally polarized photon
(described by basis state |H i) and a vertically polarized one
(corresponding to basis state |V i). We note in passing, that
the direction the photon exits the interferometer (horizon-
tally or vertically) is not related in any way to its polarization,
since the two domains are fully independent.
A polarizer beam splitter (PBS) resembles the function
of a beam splitter, in the sense that it splits the incoming
beam into two, but based on the polarization of each pho-
ton. A calcite crystal is usually used for this purpose and if
properly positioned, it will separate the vertically polarized
photons from the horizontally polarized ones, sending them
along different directions and thus, effectively acting as a
measurement device in the polarization domain.
If a photon is detected by D1 or D2, we can conclude with
certainty that the value ai corresponding to that photon is 0.
Similarly, if D1’ or D2’ triggers, we know with certainty that
the value ai encoded by that particular photon is 1. Unlike the
reliability characterizing the polarization degree of freedom,
where the two vectors |H i and |V i are orthogonal and can
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M. Nagy, N. Nagy: Quantum Steganography by Harnessing Entanglement as a Degree of Freedom
FIGURE 6. Recovered hidden image using a simple encoding/decoding
procedure.
always be distinguished unambiguously, we cannot achieve
full distinguishability in the entanglement domain. As we
have seen in Section 2, if the photon leaves the interferometer
vertically (ends up either in D2 or D2’, depending on its
polarization), then we know with certainty that the photon
is entangled and therefore bi = 1. But if the photon causes
either D1 or D1’ to trigger, then there is still a chance out of
three for the photon to be entangled and, therefore, encode a
1, assuming a uniform distribution of zeros and ones as values
for bi .
Therefore, since the values ai can always be recovered
exactly, the host image A can be decoded with perfect accu-
racy from its quantum representation as a stream of pho-
tons. The hidden image B, on the other hand, cannot be
recovered exactly, due to the ambiguity in distinguishing a
non-entangled photon from an entangled one. Assuming a
simple decoding strategy, in which we set bi to 1 every time
we observe the photon exiting the interferometer vertically
and assign 0 to bi otherwise, some of the bits for bi will
erroneously be set to 0. To be precise, one third of all bits
that are recovered as 0, were originally encoded as 1. In other
words, all bits that are 0 are recovered as such, while only
half of those that are 1 are retrieved correctly. Figure 6
shows the level of degradation for the recovered concealed
image, by following the simple decoding procedure men-
tioned above.
The quality of the hidden image can be improved by taking
advantage of the fact that not all bits bi have equal importance
in the quality of image B. Among the 8 bits that encode
the gray level of a pixel, the most significant ones are more
important to be decoded correctly than the least significant
ones. Classical steganography schemes are also taking advan-
tage of the rank of a bit in the gray scale representation by
sacrificing the least significant bit (or bits) to encode a hidden
message or picture, instead of the fine shades of gray in the
host image.
VOLUME 8, 2020
FIGURE 7. Recovered hidden image using an encoding/decoding scheme
based on progressive allocation of resources for most significant bits in
the gray level representation.
The same idea can be applied in our quantum steganogra-
phy scheme, by allocating more resources (photons) to higher
ranked bits in the 8-bit representation of the gray level of a
pixel. Thus, Figure 7 shows the hidden image that can be
recovered if only the four most significant bits (from the
eight encoding the gray level) are encoded in the quantum
image representation: 3 photons are used to encode the most
significant bit b7 , two photons are used to encode each of
b6 and b5 and one bit is used for b4 . The four remaining
bits (the least significant ones) are deliberately ignored. The
improvement in quality compared to Figure 6 is evident.
In general, the more photons are used to encode the value
of one bit in the entanglement domain, the higher the con-
fidence that the recovered value is correct. More precisely,
if n photons are used as physical embodiment for each bit
in the concealed image, then the probability of a bit 1 to
be incorrectly decoded as 0 is 1/2n . It follows that more
of the image originally hidden within the host image can
be retrieved, if more photons are available in the quantum
representation of the image.
To exemplify, imagine now that the host image is a color
image where each of the three channels, Red, Green and
Blue are encoded on 8 bits. If the concealed image remains a
gray scale image of the same size as the host, then there are
24 photons available to encode the gray level of each pixel
in the concealed image. The extended resources available
allow for almost a full recovery of the concealed image.
Figure 8 depicts how much of the original Lena image can
be recovered with five photons allocated for each of b7 and
b6 (the most significant bits in the gray level encoding), four
photons for each of b5 and b4 and three photons for each of
b3 and b2 . One can see that the quality has been brought up
almost to the level of the original Lena image.
Other factors that may influence the quality of the recov-
ered image are the actual values of the parameters controlling
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 M. Nagy, N. Nagy: Quantum Steganography by Harnessing Entanglement as a Degree of Freedom
FIGURE 8. Further improvement of the recovered hidden image if
24 photons are used as physical embodiment for each pixel in the image.
the optical devices used in order to generate the photons
and to measure them. Thus, we can distinguish between the
transmitter bandwidth and the receiver bandwidth, as two
such parameters. These bandwidths are not defined in terms
of range of frequencies because the photons are transmitted
one at the time, sequentially, and they can only have two
frequencies: all photons that are not entangled have the same
frequency being generated by the same low-intensity light
source and all entangled photons also share the same fre-
quency, being generated through the same SPDC process.
Therefore, we can define the transmitter bandwidth as the
number of photons that can be generated and transmitted per
time unit (second). This parameter depends on the optical
characteristics of the light sources used and the non-linear
crystal responsible for generating the pair of entangled pho-
tons through SPDC. On the other hand, the receiver band-
width is defined as the number of photons that can be received
and measured per time unit (second). The latter depends
on the optical characteristics of the elements composing the
Mach-Zehnder interferometer and the polarizer beam split-
ters. Naturally, the receiver bandwidth needs to be at least
as high as the transmitter bandwidth, otherwise photon loss
will occur, which will reduce the resolution of the recovered
image.
V. SECURITY ANALYSIS
The field of steganography is usually concerned with clever
methods to disguise sensitive information as part of incon-
spicuous, routine public data. According to this philosophy,
effort and creativity are spent in order to make secret informa-
tion look like a lot of other information transferred through a
communication channel, such that a superficial monitoring
of the channel does not raise any flags and does not ulti-
mately reveal the hidden data. Therefore, unlike cryptogra-
phy, steganography does not usually encrypt the data it aims
to hide by spending resources on computationally intensive
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encryption/decryption procedures. Consequently, a security
analysis is not looking at how difficult it is to decrypt the
cipher text, but perhaps at how likely it is for the hidden data
to be discovered within the public data.
Our steganographic procedure manipulates photon polar-
ization in order to encode the cover image. Due to the sim-
plicity of setting and measuring the polarization of a photon,
this is the typical degree of freedom exploited in conjunction
with photons, both for cryptographic and quantum computing
purposes. The degree of freedom opened by the possibility of
a photon to be part of an entangled pair is not used in practice,
perhaps because distinguishing between a single, indepen-
dent photon and one that is part of an entangled pair cannot be
done reliably and requires more advanced equipment, such as
a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. However, precisely because
it is not actually exploited in quantum cryptography, it may
serve as an ideal way to embed some secret information into
this secondary domain, besides the information encoded in
the polarization, which everyone expects in a photon.
Nevertheless, the level of security of our steganographic
technique can be raised, if necessary, by exploiting specific
quantum mechanical properties in order to detect any unau-
thorized third party attempting to dig up the hidden image.
To achieve this goal, the procedure described in the previous
section has to be slightly modified, as follows. Assume that
Alice, the sender, wishes to transmit to Bob, the legitimate
receiver, a secret image embedded within a public one. The
physical support for the two images is a sequence of photons,
one photon per each bit required to represent the digital
image. The cover image is encoded in the polarization state
of the photons (either horizontal or vertical), while the hidden
image is encoded in the entanglement degree of freedom of
the same photons. This means that a bit with value 0 in the
hidden image corresponds to a ‘‘regular’’ photon generated
from a low-intensity photon emitter and a bit with value 1 is
physically embodied in the signal photon generated through
SPDC.
Once each photon is double-encoded with the value of the
corresponding bit in the cover image and the hidden image,
the position of each pixel in the image is given by the position
of the encoding photons in the train (array) of photons (the
bi-dimensional images can be encoded in row order, column
order or following any other similar convention). However,
in order to prevent an unauthorized third-party, Eve, from
gaining access to the secret image, the bits of the secret image
are scrambled before encoding. Consequently, even if Eve
measures the train of photons in the two bases (see Figure 5)
like a legitimate receiver, she cannot put together the bits from
the secret image in the correct order. Furthermore, the act of
measurement disturbs the entangled states created through
the SPDC process and paves the way for detecting Eve’s
actions.
While the signal photon in an entangled pair is sent to Bob
after encoding, its ‘‘twin’’, the idler photon, is kept in Alice’s
possession and undergoes its own Mach-Zehnder interferom-
eter (see Figure 2), with Alice recording where each photon
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M. Nagy, N. Nagy: Quantum Steganography by Harnessing Entanglement as a Degree of Freedom
ended up: in detector D3 or D4. This allows Alice and Bob to
determine if a third party (Eve) meddled with the photons in
transit. Once Bob has received all the photons and measured
them, the photons belonging to an entangled pair must exit
the sender and respectively the receiver’s interferometer both
horizontally or both vertically, as detailed in Section 2. Any
mismatch points to a possible eavesdropper at work. Alice
and Bob can take advantage of this property and verify a
small fraction of the entangled photons if their measurement
outcomes coincide. Only then, Alice can disclose the correct
order of the bits through a classical public communication
channel allowing Bob to correctly reconstruct the hidden
image.
For each entangled photon disturbed by Eve, there is a 50%
chance of a mismatch between what Alice and Bob observe
through their interferometers, so the probability of detecting
an eavesdropper (Eve) increases rapidly with each entangled
state collapsed by Eve and tested by Alice and Bob:
1
Pdetect = 1 −
2n
where n is the number of entangled states tested. The postu-
lates of quantum mechanics, such as measurements collapse
the quantum state or the no-cloning theorem, which are very
useful in quantum cryptography in general, also guarantee the
security of the modified protocol above.
VI. DISCUSSION
Having described our main idea for quantum steganography
and some ways to optimize its applicability or enhance its
security, we proceed in this section to an enumeration of its
advantages, discussed in the context of existing techniques
proposed in this area. Undoubtedly, the main advantages
of our scheme stem from the double encoding technique
employed, namely, working with two different and com-
pletely independent degrees of freedom of a photon: its polar-
ization and its ability to be entangled with another photon.
Being able to encode the pixel values making up the
secret image within the same particles that constitute the
physical support for representing the non-secret or cover
image positively impacts the efficiency of our scheme, as no
additional resources (taking the form of qubits, at a generic
level, or photons, at a practical level) are required for embed-
ding the secret information. This one-to-one correspondence
between the number of photons employed in the quantum
image representation and the number of bits the cover image
is composed of also avoids raising suspicions about possible
secret information hidden within the representation, as each
photon may be interpreted as the physical embodiment of a
bit in the public image and nothing more.
At the same time, the complete independence between the
two encoding domains, the fact that if a photon is spatially
entangled or not has no consequence whatsoever on the polar-
ization state of that photon, also helps keep the two image
representations fully independent. What this means is that,
if we want to make any modification to the public, carrier
VOLUME 8, 2020
image, nothing has to be changed in the way the secret image
is encoded and viceversa, changing the secret image does not
entail modifications in the polarizations encoding the cover
image.
A common method in classical image steganography,
where each pixel in the digital image is represented either
as a single grayscale value or as three individual values for
an RGB color image, is to sacrifice the resources allocated
to represent the Least Significant Bit(s) (LSB) and use them
to encode the secret information instead. It is only natu-
ral that this idea made its way through to quantum image
steganography as well [3], [8], [9]. We have also adapted
it, in the previous section, in order to increase the quality
of the concealed image. Thus, instead of distributing the
available resources (photons) uniformly over all bit-planes,
we have devised a progressive allocation scheme that rewards
the most significant bits in the pixel value. However, unlike
previous applications of this idea, in our protocol there is
no degradation whatsoever in the quality of the cover image
(15) because of the resources sacrificed from its representation,
even if this degradation may seem imperceptible to the human
eye.
Some quantum steganographic protocols impose pre-
conditions that must be met in order for the procedure to
unfold successfully. These pre-conditions usually take the
form of some shared resource, such as a classical secret
key or an entangled state, between the parties that want to
communicate secret information disguised within innocent-
looking data [17], [22], [23]. These shared resources are
either used as part of the steganographic procedure to hide
the secret information within the structure of the public
data or they are used to encrypt the secret information prior
to being embedded into the carrier data, as a precautionary
measure, in case the hiding technique fails.
Ensuring that both the sender and the intended receiver
share some resources prior to the execution of the stegano-
graphic protocol raises problems of its own and our stegano-
graphic scheme is not relying on any such pre-conditions
being satisfied. It is true that, in our scheme, the hidden
data is not normally encrypted in any way, but, if neces-
sary, encryption of the secret data could be achieved without
any supplementary resources or requirements. The sender
can, as we have described in detail in the previous section,
scramble the order of the pixels in the concealed image and
only reveal the correct order to the intended receiver through
a public channel, after the photons have been received
and measured, provided that no eavesdropping activity is
detected.
As another point we wish to make in regard to our
steganography technique, we mention its general applicabil-
ity and versatility. We have exemplified our novel idea on
the particular case of concealing a digital image by encoding
it on the same physical support as another digital image,
playing the role of a carrier or cover data. However, nothing
precludes the technique described herein to be applied to
any other form of digital information (that is, information
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 M. Nagy, N. Nagy: Quantum Steganography by Harnessing Entanglement as a Degree of Freedom
represented as a sequence of bits), in the case of both the
hidden information or the public, cover data. This comprises
audio files, text and digital video formats among others. The
protocol can also be applied as a watermarking technique by
replacing the hidden image with a logo or a copyright note.
Removing it would amount to reconstructing the whole image
from scratch, bit by bit.
Finally, the physical embodiment of a qubit throughout
our protocol description is a photon, since a photon’s polar-
ization and entanglement degrees of freedom are relatively
easy to manipulate with current technology. More specif-
ically, single-photon interferometry, which is the corner-
stone of harnessing the entanglement domain of a photon
in order to encode information, is easy to bring about using
a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. But the same underlying
idea can be implemented with other elementary particles,
as long as some basic physical property of the particle can
be exploited for encoding information along with the ability
of the particle to interfere with itself and be entangled with
another entity. One such alternative is an electron, with its
spin serving as the primary degree of freedom for encod-
ing bits. As for electron interferometry, there exists devices
similar to a Mach-Zehnder interferometer that can allow an
electron to interfere with itself [7].
VII. CONCLUSION
The evidence presented in the paper supports the conclusion
that harnessing entanglement as a degree of freedom is a
powerful and versatile tool for enhancing information encod-
ing, when coupled with another way of representing infor-
mation, and it is a good choice for quantum steganography,
in particular.
The ease of manipulating photon polarizations makes it a
prime candidate for practical implementations of quantum
cryptographic protocols. Because everyone expects that a
photon carries information encoded in its polarization state,
it also makes polarization as the ideal candidate for encod-
ing the public (non-secret) information in a steganographic
approach, thus deflecting attention from the more elusive
hidden information encoded into the entanglement degree of
freedom of the photon. The paper describes in detail how the
secret information can be retrieved using a Mach-Zehnder
interferometer, while the cover data can be ‘‘read’’ easily
through a polarizer beam splitter.
The double-encoding idea supporting our approach to
steganography not only reduces the number of photons
required to implement the procedure, but because there are
no additional photons used to embed the hidden data (the
secret information is still encoded on the same photons that
are used for the cover data), it makes the whole repre-
sentation less suspicious to carry secret information. This
is an important departure from all previous steganographic
attempts (whether classical or quantum), in which some of
the physical resources that are supposed to embody the public
data are actually used to encode secret information, to the
detriment of the quality of the cover data representation.
213680
No such degradation in the quality of the cover data is present
in our procedure.
Although the technique we propose is easily imple-
mentable with current photon technology, its versatility
makes it adaptable to other physical support for which the
entanglement degree of freedom can be exploited (such as
electrons, for example) or other data formats besides images
(such as text, audio, video, etc.). In case it is crucial that the
secret information, once discovered, does not get decoded
by an unauthorized third party, the protocol can be extended
such that only the intended recipient can decode the secret
information, with the help of the sender, after eavesdropping
has been ruled out.
For all the reasons enumerated above, we assert that our
quantum steganography technique by harnessing entangle-
ment as a degree of freedom has clear advantages over previ-
ous approaches in terms of efficiency of resource utilization,
security, versatility, extendability, adaptability and last, but
not least, its implementability with current technology.
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VOLUME 8, 2020
MARIUS NAGY received the B.Sc. degree in com-
puter science from the Technical University of
Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in 1993, and the M.Sc. and
Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Queen’s
University, Kingston, ON, in 2001 and 2007,
respectively. His Ph.D. thesis focuses on novel
applications of quantum mechanics into informa-
tion processing and data security.
He has worked as a Software Developer in
Romania, until 1999, when he moved to Canada
to pursue an academic career. He continued as a Postdoctoral Fellow
with the School of Computing, Queen’s University, until the end of 2008.
In 2009, he took a position as a Sessional Instructor with the Department
of Mathematics and Computer Science, Royal Military College of Canada.
In February 2010, he was appointed as an Assistant Professor with the
College of Computer Engineering and Science, Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd
University, Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia. His research interests include quan-
tum information processing, particularly with applications to cryptography,
parallel, and unconventional models of computation and algorithms. His
publication record includes several book chapters and more than 40 journal
and conference papers.
Dr. Nagy was awarded the Distinguished Thesis Award for the best
M.Sc. thesis in the Department of Computing and Information Science,
in 2001, while pursuing his graduate studies at Queen’s University. He
was also a recipient of the National Science and Engineering Research
Council (NSERC) Post Graduate Scholarship from September 2002 to
August 2004 and two Ontario Graduate Scholarships from Septem-
ber 2004 to August 2006. He was the Queen’s University’s Nominee for
the 2008 NSERC Doctoral Prize in the engineering and computer sciences
category.
NAYA NAGY received the Ph.D. degree in the
field of quantum cryptography from Queen’s
University, Canada, in 2010. She is currently
an Assistant Professor with Imam Abdulrahman
Bin Faisal University, Saudi Arabia. She has
published more than 15 peer reviewed journal
articles. Her research interests include quantum
computation, cryptography, security, parallel and
distributed algorithms, and recently bioinformat-
ics. Her professional experience stems from ten
years of teaching courses and supervising projects in computer science.
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