Optimal Single-History Tokenization Disambiguation for Provably Secure Linguistic Steganography

arXiv:2611.17091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Provably secure linguistic steganography assumes that the receiver recovers the sender's tokens, but a text channel delivers only text, and ambiguous tokenizations break extraction. Existing fixes change the distribution, synchronize whole pools of tokens at a capacity that collapses with large vocabularies, or track several token histories. We prove that if extraction is exact and error-free across full-support language models, a single-history receiver is confined to a prefix-free candidate set at every step -- even if it reads the entire future text and the sender constrains later steps -- and must therefore give up the stop entropy, the entropy of deciding whether each prefix token ends there. Fixing these stop decisions on the prefix forest with shared randomness yields coin projection: a closed-form scheme that attains the bound, works with any distribution coder in one model call per token, preserves ordinary sampling, and refines SyncPool for every key. Across English, Chinese and Japanese, ambiguous text is rare (at most 11 in 1,000 tokens), yet the stop entropy at word and morpheme prefixes takes 7.2-9.0% of the entropy at every step; SyncPool's further loss comes from space and single-byte UTF-8 hubs that merge subtrees while carrying almost no stop uncertainty. Coin projection keeps 91-93% of the string entropy for the coder at every vocabulary size; with the full vocabulary, it turns 2.16-6.85 times as much entropy into message bits as SyncPool and recovers every completed message.