Steganography Without Modification: Hidden Communication via LLM Seeds
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 opera...
| Authors | Felix Mächtle, Jonas Sander, Sebastian Berndt et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 8 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 June 2026 |
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