Image steganography, the practice of concealing information within another image, traditionally faces security challenges when its methods become publicly known. To counteract this, we introduce a novel private key-based image steganography technique. This approach ensures the security of hidden information, requiring a corresponding private key for access, irrespective of the public knowledge of the steganography method. We present experimental evidence demonstrating our method's effectiveness, showcasing its real-world applicability. Additionally, we identified a critical challenge in the invertible image steganography process: the transfer of non-essential, or `garbage', information from the secret to the host pipeline. To address this, we introduced the decay weight to control the information transfer, filtering out irrelevant data and enhancing the performance of image steganography. Our code is publicly accessible at https://github.com/yanghangAI/DKiS, and a practical demonstration is available at http://yanghang.site/hidekey.

翻译：图像隐写术是一种将信息隐藏于另一幅图像中的技术，当其方法被公开时，传统上会面临安全挑战。为应对此问题，我们提出一种新颖的基于私钥的图像隐写技术。该方法确保隐藏信息的安全性，无论隐写方法是否公开，都需对应的私钥才能访问。我们通过实验证据证明了该方法的有效性，展示了其实际应用潜力。此外，我们识别出可逆图像隐写过程中的一个关键挑战：非必要信息（即“垃圾”信息）从秘密管道向宿主管道的转移。为解决此问题，我们引入衰减权重来控制信息转移，过滤无关数据并增强图像隐写性能。我们的代码已在 https://github.com/yanghangAI/DKiS 公开，实际演示可访问 http://yanghang.site/hidekey。