Generating Homoglyphs In R

Bob Rudis shows how to create homoglyphs (character sequences which look similar to other character sequences) using a few R packages:

We can try it out with a very familiar domain:

(converted <- to_homoglyph("google.com"))
## [1] "ƍ၀໐|.com"

Now, that’s using all possible homoglyphs and it might not look like google.com to you, but imagine whittling down the list to ones that are really close to Latin character set matches. Or, imagine you’re in a hurry and see that version of Google’s URL with a shiny, green lock icon from Let’s Encrypt. You might not really give it a second thought if the page looked fine (or were on a mobile browser without a location bar showing).

Click through for more details, as well as information on punycode.