Text Steganography

Look for:

Unicode homoglyphs
Zero-width characters
Whitespace patterns (spaces vs tabs)

Practical path

If plain text behaves unexpectedly, inspect codepoints and normalize carefully (do not destroy evidence).

Technique

Text stego frequently relies on characters that render identically (or invisibly):

Homoglyphs: different Unicode codepoints that look the same (Latin a vs Cyrillic а)
Zero-width characters: joiners, non-joiners, zero-width spaces
Whitespace encodings: spaces vs tabs, trailing spaces, line-length patterns

Additional high-signal cases:

Bidirectional override/control characters (can visually reorder text)
Variation selectors and combining characters used as a covert channel

Decode helpers

Unicode homoglyph/zero-width playground: https://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/unicode-steganography-homoglyph-encoder

Inspect codepoints

python3 - <<'PY'
import sys
s=sys.stdin.read()
for i,ch in enumerate(s):
  if ord(ch) > 127 or ch.isspace():
    print(i, hex(ord(ch)), repr(ch))
PY

CSS `unicode-range` channels

@font-face rules can encode bytes in unicode-range: U+.. entries. Extract the codepoints, concatenate the hex, and decode:

grep -o "U+[0-9A-Fa-f]\+" styles.css | tr -d 'U+\n' | xxd -r -p

If ranges contain multiple bytes per declaration, split on commas first and normalize (tr ',+' '\n'). Python makes it easy to parse and emit bytes if formatting is inconsistent.

References

Flagvent 2025 (Medium) — pink, Santa’s Wishlist, Christmas Metadata, Captured Noise