Paper 2026/549 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2026/549 ↗

Look Ahead! Practical CCA-secure Steganography: Cover-Source Switching meets Lattice Gaussian Sampling

Abstract

Steganography studies methods to not only protect the confidentiality of messages but also to conceal the very act of message transmission. Prior provably secure stegosystems are predominantly constructed based on a rejection sampling technique which achieves an encoding rate inversely proportional to the min-entropy of the cover channel. Furthermore, while replayable chosen-covertext attack (RCCA) secure stegosystems for general channels can be constructed based on standard cryptographic assumptions, it is known [Berndt and Liśkiewicz, EUROCRYPT'18] that achieving (standard) CCA-security for channels with memory in the so-called non-look-ahead model is in general impossible and the only known CCA-secure construction crucially relies on the channels being memoryless. In this work, we show that the impossibility on CCA-secure stegosystems can be circumvented, in the random oracle model, by dropping the non-look-ahead restriction and by restricting to a natural class of channels which we call "partially sampleable channels". These capture channels which partly consist of explicitly sampleable distributions, such as Gaussian sensor noise of digital photographs. To achieve a high encoding rate, we extend the formalisation of stegosystems to capture a technique known as "cover-source switching" in the practical steganography literature. This allows us to construct CCA-secure stegosystems for Gaussian channels using Gaussian preimage sampling techniques borrowed from lattice-based cryptography, which can theoretically achieve an embedding rate of $1/\omega(\log \log \lambda)$ regardless of the min-entropy of the channel. Our prototype implementation suggests that our scheme is practical, achieving an embedding rate of 24.7% in 24-megapixel RAW images in around 1 minute per image.