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posted by martyb on Sunday March 11 2018, @10:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the söylêntnéws.org dept.

Brian Krebs writes on how browsers choose to display IDN. The issue here is of course spoofing valid URLs with visually similar letters. You probably would notice the lame attempt in the department line but some of the international characters are very similar or indeed identical. Depending on your personal preferences it might be a good idea to use punycode instead. Could save you a headache later.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/03/look-alike-domains-and-visual-confusion/

Here are some of the applicable RFCs:

  • RFC 3490 - Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)
  • RFC 3491 - Nameprep: A Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)
  • RFC 3492 - Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)
  • RFC 3986 - Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax
  • RFC 4690 - Review and Recommendations for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)
  • RFC 5890 - Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA): Definitions and Document Framework
  • RFC 5891 - Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA): Protocol
  • RFC 5892 - The Unicode Code Points and Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA)
  • RFC 5893 - Right-to-Left Scripts for Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA)
  • RFC 5894 - Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA): Background, Explanation, and Rationale

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday March 12 2018, @04:41PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 12 2018, @04:41PM (#651411) Journal

    Purpose of DNS [business.com]: Translate unique easy-to-remember words or phrases to harder-to-remember IP addresses.
    Number of onion domains that are easy-to-remember words or phrases: ~= 0 [imgur.com]
    Number of onion domains that are indisputably easier to remember than arbitrary IP addresses: ~= 0 [imgur.com]

    Scores (Any "No" means "Fails to provide functionality of DNS"):
    Do onion domains provide unique mapping? Yes, the mapping is unambiguous.
    Do onion domains provide easily memorable words/phrases? No, although onion domains may contain words or phrases as components, the domains themselves are either gibberish, gibberish+word(s), or word(s)+gibberish.
    Do onion domains translate the domain to an IP address or other appropriate record type? Yes, but the IP address may well be easier to remember.

    ∴ Onion domains provide functionality of DNS? No. If there were no DNS and the world had to use onion or nothing, it's debatable which would win out. Slight edge to onion for potential to support things like MX records which bare IP addresses don't address; but then you'd be edging back into DNS territory.

    Analysis: Like the unreadable punycode-gibberish solution, an unreadable onion-gibberish solution proposes to replace readable names of sites with gibberish, arguably with the goal of of improving the system, but unable to do so because of the fatal flaw of being made of unintelligible gibberish by design. Our current system has serious problems, but introducing additional problems such as removing human-readability is no improvement nor solution.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2