Understanding and Characterizing the Adoption of Internationalized Domain Names in Practice

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) allow users to access the internet using domain names in their native languages. This technology provides significant convenience for non-English speaking users. However, despite the widespread acceptance and use of IDNs, the risks associated with using IDNs remain unclear in practice, such as the IDN homograph problem. To address this issue, we conduct a systematic analysis of the IDN homograph problem and explore the adoption characteristics of IDNs in practice. Specifically, we design and implement an effective IDN analysis framework, named as IDNMon. We perform a large-scale measurement study covering 863 top-level domain zone files and historical top lists based on IDNMon. Our findings indicate that the IDN registration and usage in Europe exceeds that in East Asia. Our results confirm that the IDN homograph problem is universal (12.32% of 2,623,161 IDNs face this problem), which raises serious challenges when designing protection strategies for browsers. Our work provides new insights into the adoption of IDNs in practice, contributes to a better understanding, and promotes the development of IDNs.

In IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing