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Steganography Without Modification: Hidden Communication via LLM Seeds (arxiv.org)
2 points by sbulaev 117 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A secret message is hidden in the random-number seed that picks words; the receiver rebuilds the word-picking ranges from the text and searches all seeds to read it. With the prompt shared, all 32 bits were recovered within 300 tokens; without it, near-perfect at 600–800.

Abstract

We demonstrate that widely deployed Large Language Model (LLM) inference stacks harbor a steganographic channel that requires no modification to model weights, sampling code, or output distributions. The channel exploits a structural property of deterministic decoding: pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs) used in inverse-transform sampling produce a seed-dependent sequence of token-level probability intervals that can be reconstructed from the generated text alone. A sender encodes a secret message in the PRNG seed before generation; a receiver reconstructs the intervals and recovers the seed, and thus the hidden payload, by exhaustive search over the seed space. We formalize two operational modes. In the known-prompt setting, sender and receiver share the prompt, enabling exact interval reconstruction and perfect seed recovery via forced alignment. In the unknown-prompt setting, only the generated text is available; approximate interval reconstruction combined with a maximum-hit-count scoring strategy still permits reliable recovery from sufficiently long outputs. Extensive experiments across six model families and five heterogeneous text domains show that, in the known-prompt setting, full 32-bit seed recovery from the complete 2^32 candidate space achieves up to 100% accuracy, depending on model and text domain, within 300 tokens and under 35 seconds on a single GPU. In the unknown-prompt setting, recovery reaches near-perfect accuracy at 600-800 tokens in about 12 seconds. We further analyze the influence of prompting strategies, tokenization ambiguities, and sampling hyperparameters on channel reliability. Moreover, we discuss several applications of our results: First, it allows for the steganographic transmission of 32 bits, but also shows that ignorance of the prompt is not a valid security assumption.

Felix Mächtle, Jonas Sander, Sebastian Berndt, Ben Weimar, Nils Loose, Thomas Eisenbarth
arXiv:2606.09135 · cs.CR, cs.AI · submitted Jun 8, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · To appear in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2026)

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