Cutting through the Confusion: A Measurement Study of Homograph Domains in Ethereum Name Service

Jianwei Huang, Sridatta Raghavendra Chintapalli, Mengxiao Wang, Guofei Gu

Track: Security and privacy

Keywords: Ethereum Name Service, Homoglyph Attack

Abstract:

In recent years, the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) has garnered significant attention within the community for enabling the use of Unicode in domain names, thereby facilitating the inclusion of a wide array of character sets such as Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Chinese.
While this feature enhances the versatility and global accessibility of domain names, it concurrently introduces a substantial security
vulnerability due to the presence of homoglyphs—characters that are visually similar to others across Unicode and ASCII sets. These
similarities can be exploited in homoglyph attacks, posing a distinct threat to domain name integrity. This study investigates the prevalence and security implications of homoglyph domains within the ENS ecosystem, revealing that these domains present a more
pronounced security concern compared to their counterparts in the traditional Domain Name System (DNS). Despite community efforts to counteract this issue through a normalization process prior to domain resolution, our analysis uncovers significant discrepancies in how the normalization processes are applied across various applications. This inconsistency could result in the same domain name being resolved to different addresses in different applications, underscoring a critical vulnerability. To systematically evaluate this inconsistency, we designed a tool for detecting application-level discrepancies in domain normalization process without requiring access to the application’s source code. Our evaluation on hundreds of real-world Web3 applications identifies widespread deviations from established homoglyph mitigation practices, with more than 60% digital wallets and 80% dApps (decentralized applications) not able to produce consistent ENS resolving results, potentially impacting millions of users. This analysis underscores the urgent need for a standardized implementation of normalization processes to safeguard the integrity and security of ENS domains.

Submission Number: 1945