There has been a persistent requirement for safeguarding documents and the data they contain, either in printed or electronic form. This is because the fabrication and faking of documents is prevalent globally, resulting in significant losses for individuals, societies, and industrial sectors, in addition to national security. Therefore, individuals are concerned about protecting their work and avoiding these unlawful actions. Different techniques, such as steganography, cryptography, and coding, have been deployed to protect valuable information. Steganography is an appropriate method, in which the user is able to conceal a message inside another message (cover media). Most of the research on steganography utilizes cover media, such as videos, images, and sounds. Notably, text steganography is usually not given priority because of the difficulties in identifying redundant bits in a text file. To embed information within a document, its attributes must be changed. These attributes may be non-displayed characters, spaces, resized fonts, or purposeful misspellings scattered throughout the text. However, this would be detectable by an attacker or other third party because of the minor change in the document. To address this issue, it is necessary to change the document in such a manner that the change would not be visible to the eye, but could still be decoded using a computer. In this paper, an overview of existing research in this area is provided. First, we provide basic information about text steganography and its general procedure. Next, three classes of text steganography are explained: statistical and random generation, format-based methodologies, and linguistics. The techniques related to each class are analyzed, and particularly the manner in which a unique strategy is provided for hiding secret data. Furthermore, we review the existing works in the development of approaches and algorithms related to text steganography; this review is not exhaustive, and covers research published from 2016 to 2021. This paper aims to assist fellow researchers by compiling the current methods, challenges, and future directions in this field.

A Review on Text Steganography Techniques

Generative linguistic steganography mainly utilized language models and applied steganographic sampling (stegosampling) to generate high-security steganographic text (stegotext). However, previous methods generally lead to statistical differences between the conditional probability distributions of stegotext and natural text, which brings about security risks. In this paper, to further ensure security, we present a novel provably secure generative linguistic steganographic method ADG, which recursively embeds secret information by Adaptive Dynamic Grouping of tokens according to their probability given by an off-the-shelf language model. We not only prove the security of ADG mathematically, but also conduct extensive experiments on three public corpora to further verify its imperceptibility. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method is able to generate stegotext with nearly perfect security.

/pdf/provably-secure-generative-linguistic-steganography-2jv3wdtgub.pdf

Provably Secure Generative Linguistic Steganography

In this letter, we propose a novel linguistic steganographic method that directly conceals a token-level secret message in a seemingly-natural steganographic text generated by the off-the-shelf BERT model equipped with Gibbs sampling. Compared with all modification based linguistic steganographic methods, the proposed method does not modify a given cover text. Instead, the proposed method utilizes the secret message to directly generate the steganographic text. Compared with mainstream generation based linguistic steganographic methods, the proposed method enables the receiver to collect the tokens of the specific positions to directly constitute the secret message, without a complex decoding process and much side information shared between the sender and the receiver. Experimental results show that the proposed method can generate fluent, highly readable steganographic texts, while enjoying pretty good anti-steganalysis ability. This work has great application potential in real-time covert communication.

ALiSa: Acrostic Linguistic Steganography Based on BERT and Gibbs Sampling

An effective linguistic steganalysis framework based on hierarchical mutual learning

Generative linguistic steganography encodes candidate words with conditional probability when generating text by language model, and then, it selects the corresponding candidate words to output according to the confidential message to be embedded, thereby generating steganographic text. The encoding techniques currently used in generative text steganography fall into two categories: fixed-length coding and variable-length coding. Because of the simplicity of coding and decoding and the small computational overhead, fixed-length coding is more suitable for resource-constrained environments. However, the conventional text steganography mode selects and outputs a word at one time step, which is highly susceptible to the influence of confidential information and thus may select words that do not match the statistical distribution of the training text, reducing the quality and concealment of the generated text. In this paper, we inherit the decoding advantages of fixed-length coding, focus on solving the problems of existing steganography methods, and propose a multi-time-step-based steganography method, which integrates multiple time steps to select words that can carry secret information and fit the statistical distribution, thus effectively improving the text quality. In the experimental part, we choose the GPT-2 language model to generate the text, and both theoretical analysis and experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

/pdf/mts-stega-linguistic-steganography-based-on-multi-time-step-2s7uk1a0.pdf

MTS-Stega: Linguistic Steganography Based on Multi-Time-Step

Text has become one of the most extensively used digital media in Internet, which provides steganography an effective carrier to realize confidential message hiding. Nowadays, generation-based linguistic steganography has made a significant breakthrough due to the progress of deep learning. However, previous methods based on recurrent neural network have two deviations including exposure bias and embedding deviation, which seriously destroys the security of steganography. In this paper, we propose a novel linguistic steganographic model based on adaptive probability distribution and generative adversarial network, which achieves the goal of hiding secret messages in the generated text while guaranteeing high security performance. First, the steganographic generator is trained by using generative adversarial network to effectively tackle the exposure bias, and then the candidate pool is obtained by a probability similarity function at each time step, which alleviates the embedding deviation through dynamically maintaining the diversity of probability distribution. Third, to further improve the security, a novel strategy that conducts information embedding during model training is put forward. We design various experiments from different aspects to verify the performance of the proposed model, including imperceptibility, statistical distribution, anti-steganalysis ability. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the current state-of-the-art steganographic schemes.

Linguistic Steganography Based on Adaptive Probability Distribution

Traditional text steganalysis methods rely on a large amount of labeled data. At the same time, the test data should be independent and identically distributed with the training data. However, in practice, a large number of text types make it difficult to satisfy the i.i.d condition between the training set and the test set, which leads to the problem of domain mismatch and significantly reduces the detection performance. In this paper, we draw on the ideas of domain adaptation and transductive learning to design a novel text steganalysis method. In this method, we design a distributed adaptation layer and adopt three loss functions to achieve domain adaptation, so that the model can learn the domain-invariant text features. The experimental results show that the method has better steganalysis performance in the case of domain mismatch.

Domain Adaptational Text Steganalysis Based on Transductive Learning

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Boya Yang

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

Linguistic Steganography Based on Adaptive Probability Distribution

Domain Adaptational Text Steganalysis Based on Transductive Learning