Abstract: With the rapid development of power network communication systems,a large amount of digital information can be transmitted more efficiently through the power network.However,while improving communication efficiency,the increasing risk of network attacks brings a series of security issues such as privacy leakage and information tampering.In this context,especially in scenarios such as unmanned inspection and remote monitoring of equipment,secure transmission of relevant defect information in the power system is particularly important.Therefore,to ensure the security of information transmission,data hiding technology has received widespread research and attention.In view of the commonly existing problems of low embedding payload and low security in current data hiding technology,this paper proposes a high payload data hiding algorithm based on second-order Sudoku matrix after comprehensive consideration of factors such as hiding capacity,steganographic quality,and security.This algorithm extends and encodes the original Sudoku to reconstruct a new second-order matrix.It aims to guide every two nine-bit data to be embedded into pairs of pixels of the original image in a way that minimizes distortion,thus achieving the technical goal of high payload data hiding.The selection of the original Sudoku is determined by a secret key shared in advance by the communication parties,which can be reliably transmitted through quantum key distribution technology,further enhancing the security of the proposed algorithm.

Key words: Data hiding, Embedding payload, Power system, Secure communication, Quantum key distribution