A Novel Linguistic Steganography Based on Synonym Run-Length Encoding

In order to prevent the synonym substitution breaking the balance among frequencies of synonyms and improve the statistical undetectability, this paper proposed a novel linguistic steganography based on synonym run-length encoding. Firstly, taking the relative word frequency into account, the synonyms appeared in the text are digitized into binary values and expressed in the form of runs. Then, message are embedded into the parities of runs' lengths by self-adaptively making a positive or negative synonym transformation on boundary elements of two adjacent runs, while preserving the number of relative high and low frequency synonyms to reduce the embedding distortion. Experimental results have shown that the proposed synonym run-length encoding based linguistic steganographic algorithm makes fewer changes on the statistical characteristics of cover texts than other algorithms, and enhances the capability of anti-steganalysis.