SemSteDiff: Generative Diffusion Model-Based Coverless Semantic Steganography Communication

Semantic communication (SemCom), as a novel paradigm for future communication systems, has recently attracted much attention due to its superiority in communication efficiency. However, similar to traditional communication, it also suffers from eavesdropping threats. Intelligent eavesdroppers could launch advanced semantic analysis techniques to infer secret semantic information. Therefore, some researchers have designed Semantic Steganography Communication (SemSteCom) schemes to confuse semantic eavesdroppers. However, the state-of-the-art SemSteCom schemes for image transmission rely on the pre-selected cover image, which limits the generalization. To address this issue, we propose a Generative Diffusion Model-based Coverless Semantic Steganography Communication (SemSteDiff) scheme to hide secret images into generated stego images. The semantic related private and public keys enable legitimate receiver to decode secret images correctly while the eavesdropper without the completely correct key-pairs fail to obtain them. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the plug-and-play design in different Joint Source-Channel Coding (JSCC) frameworks. Results under different eavesdropping settings show that, when Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) = 0 dB, the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of the legitimate receiver is 4.14 dB higher than that of the eavesdropper.