Rethinking Prefix-Based Steganography for Enhanced Security and Efficiency

Abstract

Generative models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in synthesizing realistic content, creating new opportunities for secure communication through steganography---the practice of embedding covert messages within seemingly innocuous data. While prefix-based steganography, which encodes secret messages into shared probability intervals during generative sampling, has emerged as a promising paradigm for provably secure communication, its practical adoption remains constrained by inherent tradeoffs between security, capacity, and efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose two enhancements. The first enhancement optimizes quantization distortion in existing frameworks to minimize KL divergence, thereby enhancing theoretical security. The second redesigns the sampling mechanism via distribution coupling to amplify steganographic capacity, achieving this without incurring substantial computational overhead. Experimental validation on text generation task confirms our enhancements substantially outperform previous implementations, demonstrating notable capacity improvements, marked security enhancements, and efficiency gains on consumer-grade hardware. Cross-task comparisons with popular provably secure steganography further establish the proposed enhancements as achieving superior security-capacity-efficiency tradeoffs across diverse generative scenarios, advancing the practical deployment of provably secure steganography systems.