arXiv Computation and Language September 1, 2026 By Ruiyi Yan, Chenhui Chu, Zhongliang Yang, Yugo Murawaki

A Comprehensive Survey on Linguistic Steganography: Methods, Countermeasures, Evaluation, and Challenges

Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →

This survey reviews 148 linguistic steganographic methods, 60 countermeasures, 23 evaluation metrics, and 9 open challenges, providing taxonomies, reviews, and adoption analyses. It identifies five paradigm shifts brought by large language models: moving from covertext modification to prompt-only generation, from heuristic to provable security, from white-box symmetric models to black-box or asymmetric access, from security-centric designs to joint optimization, and from text-quality concerns to engineering issues. The paper aims to serve as a reference and roadmap for practical and responsible linguistic steganography in the LLM era.

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