The use case I'm defending against have been recent reports of standard looking 
domains with Greek or Cyrillic characters that appear like very similar to 
their Western alphabet counterparts: CitiBank.com vs. CitiB(Greek alpha)nk.com, 
(I don’t think this comes through the mailing list) CitiBank.com vs. 
CitiBαnk.com.

 

I click on the link and maybe behind the page, the browser translates it to 
something else, but all I see is what looks like my Bank’s URL until it’s too 
late.

 

https://www.whois.com/whois/citibank.com

https://www.whois.com/whois/citib%CE%B1nk.com

 

BTW, that last domain is available!

 

If once a year that means I can’t download the driver for my LILYGO T-SIM7000G 
without special effort… s’be’it. That would be a purposeful measured action. I 
know it’s narrow minded and everything, for my personal/household daily 
surfing, I’m just not interested in IDN 
(https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/about/idns). 

 

Given that the risks are real, I’m back in the white-bread ‘murica only 
Internet where a URI/URL was

  “A URI is composed from a limited set of characters consisting of

   digits, letters, and a few graphic symbols.  A reserved subset of

   those characters may be used to delimit syntax components within a

   URI while the remaining characters, including both the unreserved set

   and those reserved characters not acting as delimiters, define each

   component's identifying data.” (RFC3986, RFC3305 or even earlier)

 

Specific answers to your ?s: “Burton, the feature you are asking for would be 
blocking IDNA domains?” YES

 

As for your scale question, my firewall is a disgustingly beefy 65W i5-8400 
(Coffee Lake) with 6 cores and 24Gb of RAM. Load average is 0.00. Free memory 
is 22.9GiB. I upgraded packages this morning and dnsmasq has used 7 seconds of 
CPU in 5 hours.

 

(What can I say? It was the cheap box that week at MicroCenter when I went 
shopping – in my hands NOW instead of waiting two weeks for box half as capable 
to save $100??) (Could I run it as a VM on my ESXi box? Sure – I used to do 
that before I decided to use a real NIC for the firewall instead of a USB 
“gigabit” ethernet adapter) (But where is the fun in THAT?)

 

 

 

-----Burton

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Dominik Derigs <dl...@dl6er.de> 
Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2023 11:40 AM
To: Petr Menšík <pemen...@redhat.com>; dnsmasq-discuss@lists.thekelleys.org.uk; 
B@us <bur...@burtonstrauss.us>
Subject: Re: [Dnsmasq-discuss] Filtering non-latin1 or non-ASCIII dns requests?

 

Hey Burton and Petr,

 

On Wed, 2023-05-10 at 21:12 -0500, B@us wrote:

> domains that don’t match \.[A-Za-z0-9]\.

 

You'd probably want to allow for - and _ too but Petr has the better idea how 
to achieve this:

 

On Thu, 2023-05-11 at 17:56 +0200, Petr Menšík wrote:

> reject all IDN names, which start with xn-- prefix

 

Even when truly non-ASCII domains would be possible (dig äöü), none of the 
larger registrars allow registering such domains directly and will always 
Punycode translation of the Unicode representation of the language-specific 
alphabet.

 

 

Burton, the feature you are asking for would be blocking IDNA domains?

 

Petr, I concur that this should be handled at a larger scale, however, I do 
also think it'd be okay to have such a feature when the administrator of a 
local dnsmasq says that international domains aren't something that will happen 
at their place and wants some extra protection against such letter confusion 
"attacks".

 

Best

Dominik

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