Attack vectors through Unassigned Code Points in IDN

From: Chris Weber (chris@casabasecurity.com)
Date: Tue Mar 17 2009 - 23:05:55 CST

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    In I’m reading RFC 3491 correctly, then IDNA allows for unassigned code points to exist in strings and domain names. This makes spoofing attacks possible when one these code points don’t have associated glyphs and basically show up as white space. This seems to be the case with some ranges like U+115A..U+115E under. In this case the following URL provides an attack vector in Firefox, because the domain nottrusted.org gets pushed way out of view in the Address Bar.

     

    https://www.google.comᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚᅚ.phreedom.org/

     

     

    My question is – was this the intended behavior of IDNA to allow unassigned code points in IDN? Or is this more related to a font rendering issue?

     

    7. Unassigned Code Points in Internationalized Domain Names

     

       If the processing in [IDNA] specifies that a list of unassigned code

       points be used, the system uses table A.1 from [STRINGPREP] as its

       list of unassigned code points.

     

    Thanks,

    -Chris

     

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