Re: homograph attacks

It is very important to be clear about the fact that neither
the .de table nor the .ch table (at http://www.switch.ch/de/id/faq/idn.html)
too close a relationship with German as a language (or French,
Italian, or Romansh in the Swiss case). These tables are as
much based on user needs (which we can assume have a linguistic
basis) as on technical needs. The Swiss registry decided to
keep their iso-8859-1-based implementation, whereas the German
registry upgraded to utf-8 when they introduced IDNs.

What European standards bodies spent forests of paper on was
an attempt at some 'ultimately correct' linguistic-based table.
What we need for IDN are reasonably okay tables that do not
need to be 'linguistically correct'.

Regards,    Martin.

At 08:28 05/02/17, Martin v. Lis wrote:
 >Michel Suignard wrote:
 >> I have seen European standard bodies spending forests of paper to try
 >> to establish these language tables, but there have never been an
 >> authoritative version because simply you can't.
 >
 >Why do you say that? DENIC is using an authorative list for .DE, see
 >
 >http://www.denic.de/de/domains/idns/liste.html
 >
 >> It is not a bad idea to have language tables to filter, but you have
 >> to allow exception for the reasons exposed above.
 >
 >No, you don't. The exception you mention (Hgen-Dazs) is already
 >covered in the list of characters. It might be that some company
 >cannot use its logo as a domain name - tough luck. There might not
 >even be a Unicode character for the logo. They will find a solution,
 >using some sort of transliteration. If enough users complain that
 >they want a certain, say, Greek character to be available in the
 >.de zone, DENIC might reconsider. However, I very much doubt this
 >will ever happen. For the .de zone, the DENIC list of characters
 >covers all actual needs. It may be that artificial needs are not
 >covered, but I could not care less.
 >
 >It is a very good idea to be more restrictive at the beginning,
 >and the gradually become less restrictive. This is how the DNS
 >started out - allowing only ASCII letters. With IDNA, it is
 >possible to widen this, but that does not mean you cannot have
 >a policy more restrictive than "full Unicode".
 >
 >Regards,
 >Martin
 >