Quantum Steganography using Coherent states in an Optical Channel

Quantum Steganography is a class of methods for covert quantum communication which take advantage of an information gap between the eavesdropper and the communicating parties to send information secretly. Challenges in this area include finding viable methods and optimizing them for the best possible communication rate. In this talk we outline several procedures by which one might communicate covertly in this manner by encoding messages in coherent state mixtures that would appear as a thermal background to eavesdroppers, calculate the efficiency of such procedures in optical systems, and describe their potential implementation and effectiveness on actual quantum hardware using homodyne measurement schemes.