I also created a Chrome Ext that reveals use of zero-width characters

In plain words

This Chrome extension detects and reveals zero-width characters hidden in web pages and text. Zero-width characters are invisible Unicode characters that can be used to hide information or manipulate content without visible changes. The extension is useful for anyone concerned about hidden text injection, data obfuscation, or security issues related to invisible character exploitation. It works by highlighting or displaying these normally invisible characters so users can see exactly where they appear in their browser.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

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  A Chrome extension to detect zero-width characters2018 · github.com · ▲5

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  I built a demo of two Unicode steganography techniques, zero-width characters and homoglyph substitution, in the context of AI misalignment. The first is about the use of two invisible zero-width characters (ZWS and ZWNJ) to binary encode text. The second is much cooler. Most characters in the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets look nearly identical, but have different unicode. If you have text to encode and convert it into binary representation (1s and 0s), you could take plain english "carrier" text and for each 1 in the binary representation you could substitute the Cyrillic letter equivalent.…

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