Risk: Informational
Opera is trying to close the net on phishers with the release on February 25th 2005 of a second beta of its forthcoming Opera 8 browser. The Beta 2 release is designed to display the name of an organisation that owns the certificate of a site inside an address bar located next to the padlock icon that indicates the security of a site. By clicking on the bar, surfers can find out who issued a certificate.
Opera Software explained that the approach helps users decide about the validity of a site. "Before digital certificate information wasn't presented, now at least we're giving users some information to make a decision. Users need to be a bit more educated."
An unintended result of the IDN (International Domain Name) standard means domain names can be registered with certain international characters - which look like other commonly used characters - in order to hoodwink users into believing they are on a different, trusted site. As such, the feature creates a new wheeze for phishing attacks. Microsoft doesn't support IDN in IE but most other browser manufacturers do, obliging them to act after security firms highlighted the issue.
Opera's answer to this challenge is to only display localised domain names from certain top level domains (TLD) in its second beta. "Opera selects TLDs that have established strict policies on the domain names they allow to be registered. This ensures that users who depend on IDN, for example when accessing sites under .jp or .kr, will have a favourable user experience," it said. Outside of trusted domains, Beta 2 will display IDN domains in punycode, which transcribes international characters into ASCII.
Restricting the use of IDNs is a sensible approach in Western Europe but fails to work well in the rest of the world. Opera are also currently talking to other browser manufacturers, digital certificate firms and registration bodies with the aim of thrashing out a unified approach to the IDN problem.