IDN homograph attack

Uncommon card · No. 159352

An internationalized domain name (IDN) homograph attack (also homoglyph attack) is a method used by malicious parties to deceive computer users about the identity of the remote system they are communicating with. This is achieved by exploiting the fact that many different characters look alike and the user is unlikely to spot a subtle substitution. For example, the Cyrillic, Greek and Latin alphabets each have a letter ⟨o⟩ that has the same shape but have different code points. This kind of spoofing attack is also known as script spoofing. Unicode supports numerous scripts (writing systems), and, for a number of reasons, similar-looking characters (such as Greek Ο, Latin O, and Cyrillic О) each has its own code point despite being homoglyphs. Their incorrect or malicious usage is potentially an opportunity for security attacks. Thus, for example, a regular user of exаmple.com (exаmple.com) may be lured to click on it unquestioningly as an apparently familiar link, unaware that the third...

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