Secret-Stego Dissimilarity as a Design Axis: Invertible Coverless Image Steganography with Diffusion Models

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.13597v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coverless image steganography (CIS) synthesizes a stego image rather than modifying an existing cover image, enabling authorized recipients to reconstruct the original secret image from the stego. Existing diffusion-based CIS methods can generate natural-looking stego images but preserve substantial visual similarity to the secret image. This resemblance risks exposing structural and semantic cues, giving rise to security vulnerabilities that can