internationalized domain names

An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that (potentially) contains non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics, as required by many European languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. However, the standard for domain names does not allow such characters, and much work has gone into finding a way around this, either by changing the standard, or by agreeing on a way to convert internationalized domain names into standard ASCII domain names while preserving the stability of the domain name system. The latter method now appears to be the one that will be adopted, a system called Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) having been proposed, based on the Punycode ASCII encoding of normalized (Nameprep) Unicode strings. In IDNA, the term internationalized domain name means specifically any domain name consisting only of labels to which the IDNA ToASCII algorithm can be successfully applied.

History of IDN

07/98	Asia Pacific Networking Group (now known as APSTAR) iDNS Working Group formed - chaired by James Seng
1999	Early Research in IDN at National University of Singapore, Center for Internet Research
02/99	iDNS Testbed launched with participation from CNNIC, JPNIC, KRNIC, TWNIC, THNIC, HKNIC and SGNIC
11/99	IETF IDN Birds-of-Feather in Washington
01/00	IETF IDN Working Group formed chaired by James Seng and Marc Blanchet
03/01	ICANN Board IDN Working Group formed
11/01	ICANN IDN Committee formed
03/03	Publication of RFC 3454, RFC 3490, RFC 3491 and RFC 3492
06/03	Publication of ICANN IDN Guidelines for registries
05/04	Publication of RFC 3743, Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Registration and Administration for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

Phishing

It is possible to use IDN for phishing. See Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications.
In February of 2005, The Shmoo Group made the issue of phishing by aid of IDN spoofing apparent. See The Shmoo Group - The state of homograph attacks.

External links

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