Abstract. We use a chaotic laser, instead of thermal light, as the light source in temporal ghost imaging. This laser is generated by employing an external optical feedback. The imaging magnification is varied by adjusting the group-delay dispersion parameters of the fibers. The temporal ghost imaging result is the convolution between the transmission function of the object and the temporal correlation functions of the chaotic laser. The simulation experiment, which uses a controllable time switch as the object, shows the effectiveness of our scheme. This scheme could find applications in the time-domain tomography of pulses. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.