[82475] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Non-English Domain Names Likely Delayed
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Neil Harris)
Tue Jul 19 12:00:02 2005
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 16:59:29 +0100
From: Neil Harris <neil@tonal.clara.co.uk>
To: Brad Knowles <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
Cc: NANOG <nanog@merit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <p06200768bf02a98bb756@[10.0.1.3]>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Brad Knowles wrote:
>
>
> My point was that, if you're going to try to protect the users
> against homophone/homograph attacks, you need to do it in a
> standardized way.
>
> Morover, the standards for controlling that need to be held by
> separate entities from those who are creating the tools which will
> implement those standards -- witness Microsoft's recent downgrading of
> Claria/Gator as a malware vendor, simply because they're looking at
> buying the company.
>
See Unicode Technical Report 36, rev 3.
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36/ for a thorough treatment of the
issues involved, under the auspices of the vendor-neutral Unicode
Consortium.
See in particular Appendix B, Confusables Detection, and Appendix F,
Country-Specific IDN Restrictions.
Finally, I just thought that I should point out that this problem
potentially exists in internationalizing _any_ protocol that uses
human-readable identifiers, not just DNS.
-- Neil
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