Establishing Robust Generative Image Steganography via Popular Stable Diffusion

Generative steganography, a novel paradigm in information hiding, has garnered considerable attention for its potential to withstand steganalysis. However, existing generative steganography approaches suffer from the limited visual quality of generated images and are challenging to apply to lossy transmissions in real-world scenarios with unknown channel attacks. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel robust generative image steganography scheme, facilitating zero-shot text-driven stego image generation without the need for additional training or fine-tuning. Specifically, we employ the popular Stable Diffusion model as the backbone generative network to establish a covert transmission channel. Our proposed framework overcomes the challenges of numerical instability and perturbation sensitivity inherent in diffusion models. Adhering to Kerckhoff’s principle, we propose a novel mapping module based on dual keys to enhance robustness and security under lossy transmission conditions. Experimental results showcase the superior performance of our method in terms of extraction accuracy, robustness, security, and image quality.