Paper 2025/1823 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/1823 ↗

A unified theoretical framework for steganography: balancing reliability, security and robustness

Abstract

This paper presents a unified information-theoretic framework for steganography that simultaneously addresses reliability, statistical undetectability, computational security, and robustness over noisy channels. Unlike prior work that treated these aspects separately under idealized assumptions, the framework formalizes them within a single model, providing definitions, capacity bounds, and impossibility results based on statistical distances. It also considers computationally bounded adversaries and trade-offs between payload, detectability, and error, offering a rigorous foundation for designing secure, robust, and efficient steganographic systems.