on threat feeds · MEDIUM 3.6
xn--conbase-sfb.com
imitates coinbase.comi → ı · U+0131
Chromevisibly differentSafarilooks identicalEdgelooks identical
Perfect to Safari+Edge users. Gibberish to Chrome.You’re exposed in Safari.
Whisper Labs. Field notes on the letters that lie
The web does not look the same to everyone.
Here is a domain. To half the planet it is your bank, your brand, the name you type without looking. To the other half it is junk. One copy. Registered to a stranger. Sitting on a threat feed while you read this.
the real one
a stranger’s copy
As Safari paints it, the forgery is pixel-identical to the real domain. One letter is wrong: a dotless ı standing where the i should be. At this size, in this font, you would not catch it.
registered to a stranger · on threat feeds · MEDIUM 3.6
right now you are seeing the web as San Francisco. Change browsers with the control below ↓
the evidence
here is a letter
Two letters. Two names in Unicode. The same pixels.
Unicode has tens of thousands of letters. Many of them are twins. Whether two twins actually land on the same spot is not up to Unicode. It is up to the font. Here are two of them, stacked, in Safari’s. Teal is the real letter. Red is the impostor. Bone is where the two become one, and that is where you stop being able to tell.
i · Latin → ı · dotless i · all the attacker had to do was drop the dot.
i · Latin
·
pixels shared
ı · dotless i
live check · whispergraph
Is your name a target?
Type a name. We swap one letter for a twin a real browser will paint convincingly, every way it can be done, and check each fake against 2.6B hostnames in WhisperGraph. What comes back is real. Registered right now. By someone who is not you. We also ask the registry who, and when.
here is the twin · real, registered, in the wild
A wall of 267 forgeries.
We made font-grounded look-alikes for a 500-brand panel and asked WhisperGraph which ones already exist in the DNS. 267 are registered today. 55% are browser-conditional. Perfect to one browser, plainly wrong to another. The same domain, two faces. Eight sit on threat feeds right now. Three are the same small trick: a dotless ı that Safari and Edge paint exactly like the i in netflix, coinbase, and alibaba.
0
registered look-alikes
0%
browser-conditional
0
on threat feeds
0
the dotless-ı three
on threat feeds now
One letter. Two browsers fooled, one not.
on threat feeds · MEDIUM 3.6
xn--albaba-q9a.com
imitates alibaba.comi → ı · U+0131
Chromevisibly differentSafarilooks identicalEdgelooks identical
Perfect to Safari+Edge users. Gibberish to Chrome.You’re exposed in Safari.
on threat feeds · MEDIUM 3.6
xn--netflx-t9a.com
imitates netflix.comi → ı · U+0131
Chromevisibly differentSafarilooks identicalEdgelooks identical
Perfect to Safari+Edge users. Gibberish to Chrome.You’re exposed in Safari.
the wall · all 267 of them
Read the case file.
fools that fontvisibly different
264 matches · showing 9 · 3 featured above
as Safari paints itsocial
xn--intagram-es72a.com
imitates instagram.com
s → ꜱ · U+A731
Flagged threaton threat feeds · MEDIUM 3.6
Chromelooks identicalSafarilooks identicalEdgelooks identical
as Safari paints itcrypto
xn--oinbase-ux1c.com
imitates coinbase.com
c → ᴄ · U+1D04
Flagged threaton threat feeds · LOW 1.5
Chromelooks identicalSafarilooks identicalEdgelooks identical
as Safari paints itbigtech
xn--ithub-qmc.com
imitates github.com
g → ɡ · U+0261
Flagged threaton threat feeds · LOW 1.5
Chromelooks identicalSafarilooks identicalEdgelooks identical
as Safari paints itgaming
xn--roblx-p29a.com
imitates roblox.com
o → ᴏ · U+1D0F
Flagged threaton threat feeds · LOW 1.5
Chromelooks identicalSafarilooks identicalEdgelooks identical
as Safari paints itsocial
xn--tiktk-p29a.com
imitates tiktok.com
o → ᴏ · U+1D0F
Flagged threaton threat feeds · LOW 1.5
Chromelooks identicalSafarilooks identicalEdgelooks identical
as Safari paints ittravel
xn--bookng-s9a.com
imitates booking.com
i → ı · U+0131
Live infrastructure
Chromevisibly differentSafarilooks identicalEdgelooks identical
as Safari paints itbanking
xn--cbc-jua.com
imitates cibc.com
i → ı · U+0131
Live infrastructure
Chromevisibly differentSafarilooks identicalEdgelooks identical
as Safari paints itgaming
xn--epcgames-ukb.com
imitates epicgames.com
i → ı · U+0131
Live infrastructure
Chromevisibly differentSafarilooks identicalEdgelooks identical
as Safari paints itproductivity
xn--cloud-m4a.com
imitates icloud.com
i → ı · U+0131
Live infrastructure
Chromevisibly differentSafarilooks identicalEdgelooks identical
the gap between browsers
The lie lives in the font, not the letter.
Rendered through the three font stacks browsers actually paint into the URL bar, 2,402 pairs of letters fold into one shape on some screen, somewhere. Only 400 of them fool all three. The rest depend on whose screen the domain lands on. The attack picks its victim by the font.
fool every browser
0%of the 2,402 confusable pairs are indistinguishable in all three shipping fonts. A forgery that survives the trip to every device. The other 83% only work somewhere. And somewhere is wherever the victim happens to be.
browser-conditional
0%of the registered look-alikes that fool any browser are browser-conditional . Flawless on one machine, plainly wrong on the next. The attack picks a font, and takes whoever is behind it.
where the 2,402 pairs land
Seven regions. One agreement.
Each browser keeps its own private stock of forgeries. Edge alone holds 788, Safari 229, Chrome 262 that no other font draws.
ChromeRoboto + Noto (OFL)SafariSan FranciscoEdgeSegoe UIfools all three
Hover, tap, or tab across the bars. Counts are confusable pairs; the filled dots mark which browsers merge them.
how a font lies
Two alphabets. One set of pixels.
Latin h (U+0068) and Armenian ho հ (U+0570) are unrelated letters. Lay the glyphs each browser actually draws on top of each other: Segoe UI puts them on the very same pixels, while Roboto + Noto (OFL) keeps them apart. Same domain, same codepoints. Whether you ever see the lie is decided by the machine you happen to own.
ink both shareink where they differ
registered attacks · per browser
0%
of registered look-alikes that fool any browser are browser-conditional . Pixel-identical on some machines, plainly off on others.
171 of 313 fool at least one browser; only 142 of 529 fool all three.
ChromeRoboto + Noto (OFL)171/52932%
SafariSan Francisco284/52954%
EdgeSegoe UI304/52957%
Red bar = the share of 529rendered substitutions, drawn from real registered domains, that are indistinguishable in that browser’s URL-bar font; the pale notch is the 95% confidence interval. Chrome’s Roboto + Noto separate the most. Segoe UI merges the most.
we tried to make it go away
We re-ran the whole pipeline across a sweep of similarity cutoffs, and the share of pairs that fool all three browsers never left the 15–18% band. So the disagreement between browsers is not a number we picked. It is in the fonts.
the other axis · the name in another language
A name can be forged by how it is written, not just by how it looks.
Every forgery so far leaned on a glyph that copies Latin. Here is the other move: write the name in another language, or hang it under a top-level domain that quietly means the same word somewhere else. Both resolve today. The variant engine’s fourteen algorithms see none of it.
a same-meaning TLD already taken
0%of 562 major brands already have a registered domain on an IDN top-level domain that is com in another language . 公司, 닷컴, كوم. 249 live names in all.
the name, phonetically
0%have a registered transliteration of their name in another script . аппле, μετα, 디올. 219 live names, across 12 scripts.
the conflated root zone
The map nobody draws.
ICANN treats every top-level domain as independent. But 93 of the 151 delegated internationalized TLDs are, in plain language, the same word in another script. Grouping into 61 cross-language equivalence classes. You can’t invent a TLD, so this is curation of what is already delegated; every equivalence here was recomputed to its xn-- form and checked against the live IANA root.
.com≡
集团group/conglomerate
公司company
企业enterprise
कॉमcom
קוםcom
كومcom
닷컴dot-com
transliteration · spelled “com”semantic · means “company”
.in≡one country · 10 scripts
ಭಾರತভাৰতভারতభారత్ભારતभारतبھارتഭാരതംਭਾਰਤஇந்தியா
.net≡
网络网址नेट닷넷
.store≡
商店商城بازار
.online≡
在线онлайн
.cn≡
中国中國
.ru≡
рф
label transliteration
One name. Every alphabet.
Spell the name by ear in another script and it still sounds like the brand, though not one letter is the same. You can register it under any TLD. Put both moves together and you get a spoof, fully translated: гоогле.рф, google.公司.
google→
гоогле
Cyrillicrt 1.00
γοογλε
Greekrt 1.00
גֳֳגלֶ
Hebrewrt 1.00
գոոգլե
Armenianrt 1.00
გოოგლე
Georgianrt 1.00
고옥레
Hangulrt 1.00
गॊऒग्लॆ
Devanagarirt 0.86
ゴオグレ
Katakanart 0.71
rt = round-trip faithfulness · spell it back into Latin and compare. 1.00 = the forgery reads as the brand.
already registered
Not a what-if. Live in the graph.
Made for 562brands and checked against WhisperGraph. They exist as registered hostnames right now. The current pipeline’s TLD-swap walks ASCII TLDs only, and there is no transliteration algorithm at all. So the whole surface is a blind spot. Attackers are not blind.
merck.닷컴transliteration
facebook.公司semantic
tesla.公司semantic
balenciaga.닷컴transliteration
douyin.集团semantic
amazon.닷컴transliteration
аппле.comCyrillic
הם.comHebrew
לג.comHebrew
로체.comHangul
プラダ.comKatakana
디올.comHangul
where this goes
The conflated root zone and the transliteration generator feed two new algorithms in the variant engine, and the cross-language equivalence is written up to ride on the Root Zone Label Generation Rules, the existing ICANN mechanism for same-entity variant TLDs. The linguistic axis and the visual axis are the same problem seen from two sides. A name a person trusts, rebuilt out of parts a machine calls different. The person keeps trusting it. That is the whole trick.
how we know
Drawn, measured, and checked live.
The back of the file. Every glyph on this page is a real bitmap off a real font. Every threat verdict is a live lookup. Nothing here is from memory.
01
Draw the real fonts
We draw every domain-relevant Unicode codepoint through the real fonts each browser paints into the address bar. Roboto + Noto for Chrome, San Francisco for Safari and iOS, Segoe UI for Edge. Down the same HarfBuzz + FreeType shaping path the browsers walk.
nothing drawn from memory
02
Measure. Do not guess
We compare two glyphs as drawn: pixel intersection-over-union and structural similarity. A pair lives only if it collides in that font. Unicode’s font-agnostic confusables that come out looking different, we throw away.
iou + ssim, per cell
03
Check it against the real machine
We checked the offline renders against what CoreText and DirectWrite actually paint, and they matched (median IoU ≈ 0.995). The Apple cell was frozen on a real Mac. The Windows cell on a real Windows 11 machine.
gate PASS · IoU 0.995
04
Find it in the wild
We checked font-grounded look-alikes of a 500-brand panel against WhisperGraph, all 2.6 billion hostnames, to see which a stranger had bought and which sit on threat feeds right now. The browser-conditional pattern holds on the tier that does not depend on the threshold. It is not a number we tuned.
live threat lookup
font-grounded3 browser cells2,402 confusable pairs267 registered look-alikeslive WhisperGraph threat intel
the gift · take it
Here is the list. It is yours.
Unicode keeps a list of letters that can be mistaken for each other. It is a good list. But it does not know which font your browser uses, so it guesses. It says these two might fool someone, in some typeface, somewhere. Nobody measured the typeface you are actually looking at. So we did. We drew every domain-relevant codepoint through the real fonts and kept only the pairs that come out as the same pixels. Not might. Do. 2,402 of them. Directed, not closed over itself, each one scored, each one marked strict or at-a-glance.
Take them. We are not selling anything and there is no form to fill out. You found this page; the file is right here. We made it so people would stop typing their password into a stranger’s copy of their bank, and that only works if you have it. So here it is. Free, forever. You do not have to ask us. That is the whole reason it exists. That is all we wanted.
CC‑BY‑4.0. Free, forever, no permission needed. Use it in anything, even something you sell. The one thing we ask is that you say where it came from. Built from Unicode 16.0 and real font rendering. We ship codepoints and scores, never the font binaries.
the filesview repo
visual-confusables.jsonthe canonical file, machine-readable657 KBvisual-confusables.android-ofl.txtChrome · Roboto + Noto190 KBvisual-confusables.apple-sf.txtSafari · iOS · San Francisco202 KBvisual-confusables.segoe-ui.txtEdge · Segoe UI331 KB
github.com/whisper-sec/visual-confusables →Only 400 of the 2,402 fool you in all three browsers. A letter that vanishes on Chrome is a perfect forgery on Safari. So there is one file per browser. Because the web does not look the same to everyone, and a list that pretended it did would lie to you.