Semantic-Preserving Linguistic Steganography by Pivot Translation and Semantic-Aware Bins Coding
This addresses the problem of covert communication for users needing high data embedding without semantic loss, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the trade-off between embedding payload and semantic preservation in linguistic steganography by proposing a method that pivots text between languages and uses a generation-based encoding strategy, achieving high payload while maintaining semantic consistency and resisting steganalysis.
Linguistic steganography (LS) aims to embed secret information into a highly encoded text for covert communication. It can be roughly divided to two main categories, i.e., modification based LS (MLS) and generation based LS (GLS). Unlike MLS that hides secret data by slightly modifying a given text without impairing the meaning of the text, GLS uses a trained language model to directly generate a text carrying secret data. A common disadvantage for MLS methods is that the embedding payload is very low, whose return is well preserving the semantic quality of the text. In contrast, GLS allows the data hider to embed a high payload, which has to pay the high price of uncontrollable semantics. In this paper, we propose a novel LS method to modify a given text by pivoting it between two different languages and embed secret data by applying a GLS-like information encoding strategy. Our purpose is to alter the expression of the given text, enabling a high payload to be embedded while keeping the semantic information unchanged. Experimental results have shown that the proposed work not only achieves a high embedding payload, but also shows superior performance in maintaining the semantic consistency and resisting linguistic steganalysis.