Lesson plan
Nameprep
Nameprep is the process of case-folding a string to lowercase and removal of some generally invisible code points before it is suitable to represent a domain name, or other such canonical name. It is used by the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) standard, using the Unicode standard for NFKC normalization. Nameprep is defined in RFC 3491, "Nameprep: A Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)", as a profile of stringprep, which is described in RFC 3454, "Preparation of Internationalized Strings ("stringprep")". It does not map lookalike characters to a single character nor prohibit the use of lookalike characters. There are good reasons for this, such as the fact that same sets of characters may be lookalikes in some fonts but not in others, and the fact that any decision on which character to map to will obviously provide a bias towards users of one script; but it also has potentially grave implications for security if not considered by the designers and administrators of systems based on nameprep.
Article summary
Nameprep is the process of case-folding a string to lowercase and removal of some generally invisible code points before it is suitable to represent a domain name, or other such canonical name. It is used by the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) standard, using the Unicode standard for NFKC normalization. Nameprep is defined in RFC 3491, "Nameprep: A Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)", as a profile of stringprep, which is described in RFC 3454, "Preparation of Internationalized Strings ("stringprep")". It does not map lookalike characters to a single character nor prohibit the use of lookalike characters. There are good reasons for this, such as the fact that same sets of characters may be lookalikes in some fonts but not in others, and the fact that any decision on which character to map to will obviously provide a bias towards users of one script; but it also has potentially grave implications for security if not considered by the designers and administrators of systems based on nameprep.
Key claims
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.