Generative Linguistic Steganography: A Comprehensive Review

Text steganography is one of the most imminent and promising research interests in the information security field. With the unprecedented success of the neural network and natural language processing (NLP), the last years have seen a surge of research on generative linguistic steganography (GLS). This paper provides a thorough and comprehensive review to summarize the existing key contributions, and creates a novel taxonomy for GLS according to NLP techniques and steganographic encoding algorithm, then summarizes the characteristics of generative linguistic steganographic methods properly to analyze the relationship and difference between each type of them. Meanwhile, this paper also comprehensively introduces and analyzes several evaluation metrics to evaluate the performance of GLS from diverse perspective. Finally, this paper concludes the future research work, which is more conducive to the follow-up research and innovation of researchers.