Bran (Brandon) Myers

Unicode Homoglyph Path Injection

The Discovery

During development of the Polyglottal Cipher, I discovered a critical security vulnerability in how Chrome — and most browsers — handle Unicode characters in URL paths.

Characters that look identical to ASCII but are different Unicode code points can be used to inject malicious paths that appear legitimate to users. The attack bypasses visual inspection entirely.

The Attack

Legitimate URL
https://bank.com/login

ASCII 'o' (U+006F)
Malicious URL
https://bank.com/lοgin

Greek omicron 'ο' (U+03BF)
Visually identical. Functionally different.
9.6
CVSS Score
50+
Vendors Notified
WontFix
Google Response
4+
Vendors Confirmed

Impact

Phishing attacks that bypass visual inspection. Credential harvesting at scale. Browser security model bypass. Password manager autofill exploitation — the autofill doesn't distinguish between the real URL and the homoglyph variant.

Confirmed Vulnerable

1Password
Bitwarden
Cisco PSIRT
KeePassXC
Google Chrome (WontFix)
50+ additional vendors notified

The same knowledge that enables invisible encryption reveals invisible attack vectors. The deep work on Unicode steganography exposed what no one was looking for.

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