Discussion: UTF-8 support for ENS names

[ricmoo]

This issue is intended to be used as a place to discuss the use of UTF-8 ENS names in ethers.js.

The following links are useful to have checked out, if this interests you.

• Wonderful article and real-world example of a homoglyph attack
• Confusingly similar UTF-8 List of Characters
• Homoglyph attack on wikipedia
• UTS-46 Standard
• JavaScript library and UTF-8 database
• IDN in Google Chrome
• Reddit Link regarding UTF-8 support

[ricmoo]

I have begun the implementation of nameprep, to add full support for UTF-8 to namehash for v5. :)

[rmeissner]

What is the status on this? I am using version 5.1.13 and get an error if I try to resolve 🍯dao.eth. Even if I normalize it beforehand to xn--dao-nc13b.eth it does not work as expected (both are correctly recognized by the ens app). (Edit: Not sure what the ENS app does but apparently they don't normalize the emoji ... same for etherscan ...)

Note: The Current ethers.js namehash restrictions link in the description is broken

[skylarbarrera]

bumping this, would love to see this added as we rely on this in Rainbow

[ricmoo]

@rmeissner I removed the link. The restrictions are no longer there (it used to only allow ascii7). I think the only problem with my current nameprep implementation is that it will reject certain right-to-left names which are valid.

[wmitsuda]

Some people use emoji inside their primary ENS names, having this implemented would allow them to be properly displayed in Otterscan, so I'd like to show my support for it. (I arrived at this issue while debugging why emoji names were not being resolved)

[brendandebeasi]

We are getting a lot of feedback from users of our *.eth.xyz profile service that they would like their emoji names to work. Bumping to show support

[ricmoo]

I’m working on this now. I believe it is just a matter of updating the A.1 table for string prep and running the ingestion scripts again.

This is highest on my priority list right now. :)

[jhxyz]

Thanks @ricmoo we've collected a bunch of emoji, unicode, and other special-character .eth names that the community is asking for support on! devdotxyz/eth-xyz#22

[Gilgames000]

Hello there, and thanks for your work on this, @ricmoo! Is there any recent update? I would really like to see support for this coming to Ethers as both us and other dapps that use our name service rely on this library to resolve names, and our users asked for emoji support.

I'm wondering since the homoglyph attack is a possibility what if we had an option to turn on "secure nameprep" (maybe on by default?) so to invalidate names containing confusingly similar characters?

[ricmoo]

Here is the discussions: https://discuss.ens.domains/t/ens-name-normalization/8652/130

Once that discussion is resolved, ethers will jump on board. :)

Homoglyph is only part of the problem; the original specification specified nameprep(for IDNA purposes) which doesn't allow a lot of newer emoji, since it was drafted in 2003... ;)

[ricmoo]

The latest ENS name specification is now available in v5.7.0.

This should address and UTF-8 woes, so I can finally close this ancient issue. :)