With the evolution of generative linguistic steganography techniques, conventional steganalysis falls short in robustly quantifying the alterations induced by steganography, thereby complicating detection. Consequently, the research paradigm has pivoted towards deep-learning-based linguistic steganalysis. This study offers a comprehensive review of existing contributions and evaluates prevailing developmental trajectories. Specifically, we first provided a formalized exposition of the general formulas for linguistic steganalysis, while comparing the differences between this field and the domain of text classification. Subsequently, we classified the existing work into two levels based on vector space mapping and feature extraction models, thereby comparing the research motivations, model advantages, and other details. A comparative analysis of the experiments is conducted to assess the performances. Finally, the challenges faced by this field are discussed, and several directions for future development and key issues that urgently need to be addressed are proposed.

To detect stego (steganographic text) in complex scenarios, linguistic steganalysis (LS) with various motivations has been proposed and achieved excellent performance. However, with the development of generative steganography, some stegos have strong concealment, especially after the emergence of LLMs-based steganography, the existing LS has low detection or cannot detect them. We designed a novel LS with two modes called LSGC. In the generation mode, we created an LS-task "description" and used the generation ability of LLM to explain whether texts to be detected are stegos. On this basis, we rethought the principle of LS and LLMs, and proposed the classification mode. In this mode, LSGC deleted the LS-task "description" and used the "causalLM" LLMs to extract steganographic features. The LS features can be extracted by only one pass of the model, and a linear layer with initialization weights is added to obtain the classification probability. Experiments on strongly concealed stegos show that LSGC significantly improves detection and reaches SOTA performance. Additionally, LSGC in classification mode greatly reduces training time while maintaining high performance.

Linguistic steganalysis (LS) tasks aim to effectively detect stegos generated by linguistic steganography. Existing LS methods overlook the distinctive user characteristics, leading to weak performance in social networks. The limited occurrence of stegos further complicates detection. In this paper, we propose the UP4LS, a novel framework with the User Profile for enhancing LS performance. Specifically, by delving into post content, we explore user attributes like writing habits, psychological states, and focal areas, thereby building the user profile for LS. For each attribute, we design the identified feature extraction module. The extracted features are mapped to high-dimensional user features via deep-learning networks from existing methods. Then the language model is employed to extract content features. The user and content features are integrated to optimize feature representation. During the training phase, we prioritize the distribution of stegos. Experiments demonstrate that UP4LS can significantly enhance the performance of existing methods, and an overall accuracy improvement of nearly 25%. In particular, the improvement is especially pronounced with fewer stego samples. Additionally, UP4LS also sets the stage for studies on related tasks, encouraging extensive applications on LS tasks.