Quantum steganography using prior entanglement

•Our steganography combines quantum error-correcting codes with prior entanglement.•Our steganography can separately create secret messages and the content of cover messages.•Errors in cover messages do not have affect the recovery of secret messages.•We embed a secret message in the Steane code as an example of our steganography.

Steganography is the hiding of secret information within innocent-looking information (e.g., text, audio, image, video, etc.). A quantum version of steganography is a method based on quantum physics. In this paper, we propose quantum steganography by combining quantum error-correcting codes with prior entanglement. In many steganographic techniques, embedding secret messages in error-correcting codes may cause damage to them if the embedded part is corrupted. However, our proposed steganography can separately create secret messages and the content of cover messages. The intrinsic form of the cover message does not have to be modified for embedding secret messages.