Internationalized domain name

An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains one or more non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics, as required by many non-English languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese or Hindi. However, the standard for domain names does not allow such characters, and much work has gone into finding a way to internationalize domain names into a standard ASCII format, thereby preserving the stability of the domain name system.

IDN has, by the standards of the Internet, a long history; it was originally proposed in 1996 (by M. Dürst) and implemented in 1998 (by James Seng under the guidance of T.W.Tan). After much debate and many competing proposals, a system called Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA [Faltstrom, Hoffman, Costello, 'IDN in Applications', [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3490 IDNA] , Internet Engineering Task Force, 2003] ) was adopted as the chosen standard, and has been rolled out in several top level domains.

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. (For the meaning of 'label' and 'ToASCII', see the section ToASCII and ToUnicode below.) In March 2008, the IETF formed a new IDN Working Group to update [cite web |url=http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-idnabis-protocol |title=Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA): Protocol |author=John Klensin |publisher= [http://tools.ietf.org/wg/idnabis IETF IDNAbis WG] |year=2008 ] the current IDNA protocol.

Internationalizing domain names in applications

Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) is a mechanism defined in 2003 for handling internationalized domain names containing non-ASCII characters. While much of the Domain Name System can technically support non-ASCII characters, applications such as e-mail and web browsers restrict domain names to what can be used as a hostname. Rather than redesigning the existing DNS infrastructure, it was decided that non-ASCII domain names should be converted to a suitable ASCII-based form by web browsers and other user applications; IDNA specifies how this conversion is to be done.

IDNA was designed for maximum backward compatibility with the existing DNS system, which was designed for use with names using only a subset of the ASCII character set.

An IDNA-enabled application is able to convert between the restricted-ASCII and non-ASCII representations of a domain, using the ASCII form in cases where it is needed (such as for DNS lookup), but being able to present the more readable non-ASCII form to users. Applications that do not support IDNA will not be able to handle domain names with non-ASCII characters, but will still be able to access such domains if given the (usually rather cryptic) ASCII equivalent.

ICANN issued guidelines for the use of IDNA in June 2003,and it was already possible to register .jp domains using this system in July 2003 and .info [Mohan, Ram, [http://www.iana.org/domains/idn-tables/tables/info_de_1.0.html German IDN] , [ http://www.afilias.info/register/idn/DE-INFO_IDN_Language_Table-v1-1.pdf German Language Table] , March 2003 ] domains in March 2004. Several other top-level domain registries started accepting registrations in 2004 and 2005. IDN Guidelines were first created [Dam, Mohan, Karp, Kane & Hotta, [http://www.icann.org/general/idn-guidelines-20jun03.htm IDN Guidelines 1.0] , ICANN, June 2003] in June 2003, and have been updated [Karp, Mohan, Dam, Kane, Hotta, El Bashir, [http://www.icann.org/general/idn-guidelines-14nov05.htm IDN Guidelines 2.0] , ICANN, November 2005] to respond to phishing concerns in November 2005. An ICANN working group focused on country code domain names at the top level was formed in November 2007 [cite news|author=Jesdanun, Anick (Associated Press)|url=http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=3813334|title=Group on Non-English Domains Formed|date=2 November 2007|accessdate=2007-11-02] and promoted jointly by the country code supporting organization and the Governmental Advisory Committee.

Mozilla 1.4, Netscape 7.1, Opera 7.11 and Safari are among the first applications to support IDNA. A browser plugin is available for Internet Explorer 6 to provide IDN support. Internet Explorer 7.0 [ [http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms649487.aspx What's New in Internet Explorer 7] ] and Windows Vista's URL APIs provide native support for IDN.

ToASCII and ToUnicode

The conversions between ASCII and non-ASCII forms of a domain name are accomplished by algorithms called ToASCII and ToUnicode. These algorithms are not applied to the domain name as a whole, but rather to individual labels. For example, if the domain name is www.example.com, then the labels are www, example and com, and ToASCII or ToUnicode would be applied to each of these three separately.

The details of these two algorithms are complex, and are specified in the RFCs linked at the end of this article. The following gives an overview of their behaviour.

ToASCII leaves unchanged any ASCII label, but will fail if the label is unsuitable for DNS.If given a label containing at least one non-ASCII character, ToASCII will apply the Nameprep algorithm (which converts the label to lowercase and performs other normalization) and will then translate the result to ASCII using Punycode before prepending the 4-character string "xn--". This 4-character string is called the "ACE prefix", where ACE means ASCII Compatible Encoding, and is used to distinguish Punycode-encoded labels from ordinary ASCII labels.Note that the ToASCII algorithm can fail in a number of ways; for example, the final string could exceed the 63-character limit for the DNS. A label on which ToASCII fails cannot be used in an internationalized domain name.

ToUnicode reverses the action of ToASCII, stripping off the ACE prefix and applying the Punycode decode algorithm. It does not reverse the Nameprep processing, since that is merely a normalization and is by nature irreversible.Unlike ToASCII, ToUnicode always succeeds, because it simply returns the original string if decoding would fail. In particular, this means that ToUnicode has no effect on a string that does not begin with the ACE prefix.

Example of IDNA encoding

As an example of how IDNA works, suppose the domain to be encoded is "Bücher.ch" (“Bücher” is German for “books”, and .ch is the country domain for Switzerland). This has two labels, "Bücher" and "ch". The second label is pure ASCII, and so is left unchanged. The first label is processed by Nameprep to give "bücher", and then by Punycode to give "bcher-kva", and then has "xn--" prepended to give "xn--bcher-kva". The final domain suitable for use with the DNS is therefore "xn--bcher-kva.ch".

ASCII Spoofing and squatting concerns

Because IDN allows websites to use full Unicode names, it also makes it much easier to create a spoofed web site that looks exactly like another, including domain name and security certificate, but in fact is controlled by someone attempting to steal private information. These spoofing attacks potentially open users up to phishing attacks.

These attacks are not due to technical deficiencies in either the Unicode or IDNA specifications, but because different characters in different languages can look the same, depending on the font used. For example, Unicode character U+0430, Cyrillic small letter a ("а"), can look identical to Unicode character U+0061, Latin small letter a, ("a") which is the lowercase "a" used in English. Characters that look alike in this way may be termed homonyms, "homographs", or (less ambiguously) homoglyphs.

Although a computer may display visually identical or very similar glyphs for two different characters, these differences are still significant to the computer when locating web sites or validating certificates. The user assumes a one-to-one correspondence between the visual appearance of a name and the named entity, but when two names appear identical, this correspondence breaks down.

By contrast, with the old set of a to z, 0 to 9, and the hyphen, there is little in the way of homographs. l and 1 and 0 and o are the closest, and the combination "rn" looks similar to "m" in some fonts; however, most fonts make a noticeable visible distinction between them. Still, this means even in the worst case a site like Google would still only need to register 8 names to protect against the homograph attacks.

On December 2001, two Israeli researchers, Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Alex Gontmakher, published a paper titled "The Homograph Attack", [Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Alex Gontmakher, [http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~gabr/papers/homograph_full.pdf The Homograph Attack] , Communications of the ACM, 45(2):128, February 2002] an attack that used Unicode URLs to spoof a website URL. To prove the feasibility of this kind of attack, the researchers successfully registered a variant of the domain name "Microsoft.com" which incorporated Russian language characters.

In general, this kind of attack is known as a homograph spoofing attack. This problem was anticipated before IDN was introduced, and guidelines were issued to registries to try and avoid or reduce the problem – for example, recommending that registries only accept the Latin alphabet and that of their own country, not all of Unicode. Unfortunately this advice was not followed by those in control of a number of major TLDs.

On February 7 2005, Slashdot reported that this exploit was disclosed at the hacker conference Shmoocon with an example available at http://www.shmoo.com/idn/. On browsers supporting IDNA, the URL "http://www.pаypal.com/" (where the first "a" is replaced by a Cyrillic "а") appears to lead to paypal.com but instead led to a spoofed PayPal web site that said "Meeow."

Internet Explorer 7 imposes restrictions on displaying non-ASCII domain names based on a user-defined list of allowed languages and provide an anti-phishing filter that checks suspicious Web sites against a remote database of known phishing sites.

Since Internet Explorer prior to version 7 does not support IDNs, it is not vulnerable to this kind of attack. However, older versions of Internet Explorer can be made IDN-compatible by browser plug-ins some of which are vulnerable to the spoofing attacks. On July 9 2005, the IDN-enabling plug-in Quero Toolbar 2.1.0 was released that implemented several anti-spoofing techniques like mixed-script detection and highlighting of characters belonging to different scripts.Fact|date=February 2007

On February 17, 2005, Mozilla developers announced that they would ship their next versions of their software with IDN support still enabled, but showing the punycode URLs instead, thus thwarting any attacks exploiting similarities between ASCII and non-ASCII letters (but not necessarily, for example, between Cyrillic and Greek letters, unless the user knows which Punycode URL corresponds to their chosen IDN URL) while still allowing people to access websites on an IDN domain. This is a change from the earlier plans to disable IDN entirely for the time being. [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=279099#c135]

Since then, both Mozilla and Opera have now announced that they will be using per-domain whitelists to selectively switch on IDN display for domain run by registries which are taking appropriate anti-spoofing precautions [http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/tld-idn-policy-list.html] . (See the article on homograph spoofing attacks for more details). As of September 9, 2005, the most recent version of Mozilla Firefox as well as the most recent Internet Explorer displays the spoofed Paypal URL as "http://www.xn--pypal-4ve.com/", unsightly but clearly different from the actual [https://www.paypal.com paypal.com] . By contrast, the (non-existent) "http://www.xn--pypal-4ve.org" will display in the Firefox address bar as http://www.pаypal.org, as this form of domain is prohibited from registration at the Afilias registry level and therefore does not pose the same risk.

Safari's approach is to render problematic character sets as punycode. This can be changed by altering the settings in Mac OS X's system files [cite web|url=http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301116|accessdate=2008-08-07|title= About Safari International Domain Name support] .

History of IDN

* 12/1996: Martin Dürst's original Internet Draft proposing UTF5 (the first incarnation of what is known today as ACE) - UTF-5 was first defined by Martin Dürst at the University of Zürich in [http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-duerst-dns-i18n-00|draft-duerst-dns-i18n-00.txt] [http://archive.minc.org/about/history/] [http://www.connect-world.com/articles/old_articles/Dr-TanTinWee.htm]
* 03/1998: Early Research on IDN at National University of Singapore (NUS), Center for Internet Research (formerly Internet Research and Development Unit - IRDU) led by Prof. Tan Tin Wee (IDN Project team - Lim Juay Kwang and Leong Kok Yong) and subsequently continued under a team at Bioinformatrix Pte. Ltd. (BIX Pte. Ltd.) - an NUS spin-off company led by Prof. S. Subbiah.
* 07/1998: Geneva INET'98 conference with a BoF discussion on iDNS and APNG General Meeting and Working Group meeting.
* 07/1998: Asia Pacific Networking Group (APNG, now still in existence [http://www.apng.org] and distinct from a gathering known as APSTAR [http://www.apstar.org] ) iDNS Working Group formed. [http://www.apng.org/old/commission/idns/]
* 10/1998: James Seng was recruited to lead further IDN development at BIX Pte. Ltd. by Prof. S. Subbiah.
* 02/1999: iDNS Testbed launched by BIX Pte. Ltd. under the auspices of APNG with participation from CNNIC, JPNIC, KRNIC, TWNIC, THNIC, HKNIC and SGNIC led by James Seng [http://www.minc.org/about/history/idns/idomain/]
* 02/1999: Presentation of Report on IDN at Joint APNG-APTLD meeting, at APRICOT'99
* 03/1999: Endorsement of the IDN Report at APNG General Meeting 1 March 1999.
* 06/1999: Grant application by APNG jointly with the Centre for Internet Research (CIR), National University of Singapore, to the International Development Research Center (IDRC), a Canadian Government funded international organisation to work on IDN for IPv6. This APNG Project was funded under the Pan Asia R&D Grant administered on behalf of IDRC by the Canadian Committee on Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS). Principal Investigator: Tan Tin Wee of National University of Singapore. [http://www.apng.org/old/commission/idns/ipv6/]
* 07/1999 Tout, Walid R. (WALID Inc.) Filed IDNA patent application number US1999000358043 Method and system for internationalizing domain names. Published 2001-01-30 [http://www.delphion.com/details?&pn=US06182148__]
* 07/1999: [http://mirrors.isc.org/pub/www.watersprings.org/pub/id/draft-jseng-utf5-00.txt] ; Renewed 2000 [http://www.nic.ad.jp/ja/idn/mdnkit/download/documents/mdnkit-2.4-doc/reference/draft/draft-jseng-utf5-01.txt] Internet Draft on UTF5 by James Seng, Martin Dürst and Tan Tin Wee.
* 08/1999: APTLD and APNG forms a working group to look into IDN issues chaired by Kilnam Chon. [http://www.minc.org/about/history/idns/iname/]
* 10/1999: BIX Pte. Ltd. and National University of Singapore together with New York Venture Capital investors, General Atlantic Partners, spun-off the IDN effort into 2 new Singapore companies - i-DNS.net International Inc. and i-Email.net Pte. Ltd. that created the first commercial implementation of an IDN Solution for both domain names and IDN email addresses respectively.
* 11/1999: IETF IDN Birds-of-Feather in Washington was initiated by i-DNS.net at the request of IETF officials.
* 12/1999: i-DNS.net InternationalPte. Ltd. launched the first commercial IDN. It was in Taiwan and in Chinese characters under the top-level IDN TLD ".gongsi" (meaning loosely ".com") with endorsement by the Minister of Communications of Taiwan and some major Taiwanese ISPs with reports of over 200 000 names sold in a week in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Australia and USA.
* Late 1999: Kilnam Chon initiates Task Force on IDNS which led to formation of MINC, the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium. [http://www.minc.org/oldminc/old/meetings/]
* 01/2000: IETF IDN Working Group formed chaired by James Seng and Marc Blanchet
* 01/2000: The second ever commercial IDN launch was IDN TLDs in the Tamil Language, corresponding to .com, .net, .org, and .edu. These were launched in India with IT Ministry support by i-DNS.net International.
* 02/2000: Multilingual Internet Names Consortium(MINC) Proposal BoF at IETF Adelaide. [http://www.minc.org/oldminc/old//meetings/minc_20000327.html]
* 03/2000: APRICOT 2000 Multilingual DNS session [http://www.apricot.net/apricot2000/index2.html]
* 04/2000: WALID Inc. (with IDNA patent pending application 6182148) started Registration & Resolving Multilingual Domain Names.
* 05/2000: Interoperability Testing WG, MINC meeting. San Francisco, chaired by Bill Manning and Y.Yoneya 12 May 2000. [http://www.minc.org/oldminc/old/meetings/sanfrancisco_20000512/testing_SFO.htm]
* 06/2000: Inaugural Launch of the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC) in Seoul [http://www.minc.org] to drive the collaborative roll-out of IDN starting from the Asia Pacific. [http://www.minc.org/about/history/]
* 07/2000: Joint Engineering TaskForce (JET) initiated in Yokohama to study technical issues led by JPNIC (K.Konishi)
* 07/2000: Official Formation of CDNC Chinese Domain Name Consortium to resolve issues related to and to deploy Han Character domain names, founded by CNNIC, TWNIC, HKNIC and MONIC in May 2000. [http://www.cdnc.org/english/introduction/index.html] [http://www.cdnc.org/english/news/index.html]
* 03/2001: ICANN Board IDN Working Group formed
* 07/2001: Japanese Domain Name Association : JDNA Launch Ceremony (July 13, 2001) in Tokyo, Japan.
* 07/2001: Urdu Internet Names System (July 28, 2001) in Islamabad, Pakistan, Organised Jointly by SDNP and MINC. [http://urduworkshop.sdnpk.org]
* 07/2001: Presentation on IDN to the Committee Meeting of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Academies USA (JULY 11-13, 2001) at University of California School of Information Management and Systems, Berkeley, CA. [http://www.nap.edu/books/0309096405/html/390.html]
* 08/2001: MINC presentation and outreach at the Asia Pacific Advanced Network annual conference, Penang, Malaysia 20th August 2001
* 10/2001: Joint MINC-CDNC Meeting in Beijing 18-20 October 2001
* 11/2001: ICANN IDN Committee formed
* 12/2001: Joint ITU-WIPO Symposium on Multilingual Domain Names organised in association with MINC, 6-7 Dec 2001, International Conference Center, Geneva.
* 01/2003: Free implementation of StringPrep, Punycode, and IDNA release in GNU Libidn.
* 03/2003: Publication of RFC 3454, RFC 3490, RFC 3491 and RFC 3492
* 06/2003: Publication of [http://www.icann.org/general/idn-guidelines-20jun03.htm ICANN IDN Guidelines for registries] Adopted by .cn, .info, .jp, .org, and .tw registries.
* 05/2004: Publication of RFC 3743, Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Registration and Administration for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
* 03/2005: First Study Group 17 of ITU-T meeting on Internationalized Domain Names [http://www.itu.int/md/T05-SG17-050330/sum/en]
* 05/2005: .IN ccTLD (India) creates expert IDN Working Group to create solutions for 22 official languages
* 04/2006: ITU Study Group 17 meeting in Korea gave final approval to the Question on Internationalized Domain Names [http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/newslog/Multilingual+Internet+Work+Progresses.aspx]
* 06/2006: Workshop on IDN at ICANN meeting at Marrakech, Morocco
* 11/2006: ICANN GNSO IDN Working Group created to discuss policy implications of IDN TLDs. Ram Mohan elected Chair of the IDN Working Group.Fact|date=May 2008
* 12/2006: ICANN meeting at São Paulo discusses status of lab tests of IDNs within the root.
* 01/2007: Tamil and Malayalam variant table work completed by India's C-DAC and Afilias
* 03/2007: ICANN GNSO IDN Working Group completes work, Ram Mohan presents report at ICANN Lisboa meeting. [Mohan, Ram, [http://gnso.icann.org/correspondence/gnso-idn-wg-outcomes-ram.pdf GNSO IDN Working Group, Outcomes Report] (PDF), ICANN]
* 10/2007: Eleven IDNA top-level domains were added to the root nameservers in order to evaluate the use of IDNA at the top level of the DNS. [ [http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-2-09oct07.htm On Its Way: One of the Biggest Changes to the Internet] ] [ [http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-15oct07.htm My Name, My Language, My Internet: IDN Test Goes Live] ]
* 01/2008: ICANN: Successful Evaluations of .test IDN TLDs [ [http://icann.org/announcements/announcement-31jan08.htm Successful Evaluations of .test IDN TLDs] ]
* 04/2008: IETF IDNAbis WG chaired by Vint Cerf continues the work to update IDNA [ (2008)]
* 06/2008: ICANN board votes to develop final fast-track implementation proposal for a limited number of IDN ccTLDS. [ [http://isoc-ny.org/wiki/ICANN_-_Paris/IDN_CCTLD_discussion ICANN - Paris/IDN CCTLD discussion - Wiki ] ]
* 10/2008: ICANN Seeks Interest in IDN ccTLD Fast-Track Process [ [http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-02oct08-en.htm ICANN Seeks Interest in IDN ccTLD Fast-Track Process] ]

Top-Level Domains known to accept IDN registration

* .ar: Starting in 2009. See [http://www.nic.ar/faqidn.html FAQ]
* .ac: see [http://www.nic.ac/AC-IDN-Policy.pdf details]
* .ae
* .at: see [http://www.nic.at/de/service/technische_informationen/idn/zeichentabelle_konverter/ details]
* .biz NeuLevel/NeuStar supports Chinese, Danish, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish IDN in .biz: see [http://www.neulevel.biz/idn/ details]
* .br (May 9 2005) for Portuguese(Brazilian) names: see [http://registro.br/anuncios/20050504.html details]
* .cat (February 14 2006) for Catalan names: see [http://domini.cat/en_faq/index.php#p4.3. details]
* .com see [http://www.verisign.com/information-services/naming-services/internationalized-domain-names/ details]
* .ch (March 1 2004)
* .cl (September 21 2005): see [http://www.nic.cl/CL-IDN-policy.html details]
* .cn: see [http://www.cnnic.cn details]
* .de (March 1 2004): see [http://www.denic.de/en/domains/idns/liste.html details]
* .dk (January 1 2004), (æ, ø, å, ö, ä, ü, & é): see [http://æøå.dk-hostmaster.dk details]
* .es (October 2 2007), (á, à, é, è, í, ï, ó, ò, ú, ü, ñ, ç, l·l): see [https://www.nic.es/descargas/Instruccion_DG.pdf details]
* .fi (September 1 2005): see [http://www.ficora.fi/en/index/palvelut/palvelutaiheittain/fiverkkotunnukset/aakkostenkaytto.html details]
* .gr (July 4 2005) for Greek names: see [https://grweb.ics.forth.gr/english/gr_char_en.html details]
* .hk (March 8 2007) for Chinese characters: see [https://www.hkdnr.hk/aboutHK/faq_7.jsp details]
* .hu
* .info (March 19 2003): see [http://www.afilias.info/register/idn/ details]
* .io: see [http://www.nic.io/IO-IDN-Policy.pdf details]
* .ir: see [http://www.nic.ir/idn details]
* .is (July 1 2004): see [http://www.isnic.is/english/ details]
* .jp (July 2003), for Japanese characters (Kanji, hiragana & katakana)
* .kr (August 2003), for Korean characters
* .li (March 1 2004)
* .lt (March 30 2003), (ą, č, ę, ė, į, š, ų, ū, ž): see [http://www.domreg.lt/static/doc/public/idn_symbols-en.pdf details]
* .lv (2004): see [http://www.nic.lv/DNS/lvdomain.php details]
* .museum (January 20 2004): see [http://about.museum/idn/ details]
* .net: see [http://www.verisign.com/products-services/naming-and-directory-services/naming-services/internationalized-domain-names/index.html details]
* .no (February 9 2004): see [http://www.norid.no/domeneregistrering/idn/idn_nyetegn.en.html details]
* .nu: see [http://www.nunames.nu/Local-Language.cfm details]
* .org (January 18 2005): see [http://www.pir.org/index.php?db=content/FAQs&tbl=FAQs_Registrant&id=2 details]
* .pe (December 8 2007): see [http://www.nic.pe/nuevas_politicas_docs.php details]
* .pl (September 11 2003): see [http://www.dns.pl/IDN/idn_intro_eng.html details]
* .pt (July 1 2005) for Portuguese characters
* .se (October 2003), for Swedish characters, summer 2007 also for Finnish, Meänkieli, Romani, Sami, and Yiddish: see [http://www.iis.se/docs/teckentabell-03.pdf details]
* .sh: see [http://www.nic.sh/SH-IDN-Policy.pdf details]
* .su (April 28, 2008) see [http://www.fid.su/english/?newsid=1207819620 details]
* .tm: see [http://www.nic.tm/TM-IDN-Policy.pdf details]
* .tr (November 14 2006: see [http://www.nic.tr details]
* .tw Traditional Chinese characters: see [http://www.twnic.net.tw details]
* .vn Vietnamese: see [http://www.vnnic.net.vn/tenmientv/bangma.htm details]

Non-IDNA or non-ICANN registries that support non-ASCII domain names

There are other registries that support non-ASCII domain names. The company ThaiURL.com in Thailand supports .com registrations via its own modified DNS, ThaiURL. Because these companies, and other organizations that offer modified DNS systems, do not subject themselves to ICANN's control, they must be regarded as alternate DNS roots. Domains registered with them will therefore not be supported by most Internet Service Providers, and as a result most users will not be able to look up such domains without manually configuring their computers to use the alternate DNS.

See also

* Unicode
* Nameprep
* Punycode
* Internationalized Resource Identifier

References

External links

* RFC 3454 (Stringprep)
* RFC 3490 (IDNA)
* RFC 3491 (Nameprep)
* RFC 3492 (Punycode)
* [http://www.icann.org/general/idn-guidelines-14nov05.htm ICANN Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names v2.0]
* [http://www.icann.org/general/idn-guidelines-20jun03.htm ICANN Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names v1.0]
* [http://gnso.icann.org/correspondence/gnso-idn-wg-outcomes-ram.pdf IANA Repository of TLD IDN Practices]
* [http://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/ GNU Libidn, an implementation of the Stringprep, Punycode and IDNA specifications.]
* [http://idn.icann.org/ IDN TLD evaluation gateway]
* [http://www.imc.org/idna/ Internet Mail Consortium IDNA test tool] (includes Perl source code)
* [http://www.atm.tut.fi/list-archive/ietf-announce/msg13572.html IANA e-mails explaining the final choice of ACE prefix]
* [http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36/ Unicode Technical Report #36 - Security Considerations for the Implementation of Unicode and Related Technology]
* [http://www.icann.org/topics/idn.html ICANN Internationalized Domain Names] .
* [http://www.iana.org/assignments/idn/ IDN Language Table Registry]