Multi-User Multi-Key Image Steganography with Key Isolation

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 24 Mar 2026] Multi-User Multi-Key Image Steganography with Key Isolation Tzu-Ti Wei, Yu-Han Tseng, Jun-Yi Lin, Yu-Chee Tseng, Jen-Jee Chen Steganography conceals secret information within innocuous carriers while preserving visual fidelity and enabling reliable recovery. Recent unified networks operate normally under untriggered conditions but switch to hidden steganographic tasks when triggered. PUSNet follows this paradigm by performing image purification during normal operation and steganographic embedding when activated. However, it supports only a single user with one key pair, limiting its applicability in multi-user settings. We propose PUSNet-MK, a multi-key extension that enforces strict key isolation via a mismatched-key isolation loss, effectively preventing cross-key decoding when a wrong key is applied. This design preserves the intended steganographic behavior while addressing a critical security limitation of PUSNet. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PUSNet-MK produces high-quality stego images and accurate secret recovery, while preventing unintended information leakage. Comments: 6 pages, 5 figures Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) MSC classes: 68U10, 94A62 ACM classes: I.4.9; K.6.5 Cite as: arXiv:2603.23005 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.23005v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.23005 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Yu-Chee Tseng [view email] [v1] Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:50:27 UTC (1,893 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)