(C) BoingBoing
This story was originally published by BoingBoing and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



How to hide secret messages in emoji [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2025-02-12

Using variation selectors, you can conceal messages of arbitrary length within emoji, or indeed any unicode character. "To be clear, this is an abuse of unicode and you shouldn't do it," writes Paul Butler. "If your mind is wandering to practical use cases for this, shut it down."

Most unicode characters do not have variations associated with them. Since unicode is an evolving standard and aims to be future-compatible, variation selectors are supposed to be preserved during transformations, even if their meaning is not known by the code handling them. So the codepoint U+0067 ("g") followed by U+FE01 (VS-2) renders as a lowercase "g", exactly the same as U+0067 alone. But if you copy and paste it, the variation selector will tag along with it.

The hidden data can be detected in text by machines looking for that sort of thing, so don't get carried away. The fun thing now might be to go looking in existing text to see who has been using this technique.

Previously:

• Steganographically hiding secret messages in fake fingerprints

• The Smiths vinyl contains hidden secret messages

• Hiding secret messages in whale song

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/02/12/how-to-hide-secret-messages-in-emoji.html

Published and (C) by BoingBoing
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/boingboing/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.