Systems and methods for Unicode homograph anti-spoofing using optical character recognition

1. A method for Optical Character Recognition (“OCR”) based anti-spoofing for Unicode homograph, comprising:

performing, by a computing device, an OCR identification on an original electronic address so as to obtain an OCR electronic address;

processing, by the computing device, the original electronic address to obtain a modified access address, and the OCR electronic address to obtain a modified OCR electronic address;

comparing the modified access address to the modified OCR electronic address; and

determining whether a Unicode homograph spoofing situation exists based on results of the comparing.

2. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the original electronic address comprises an address that is allowed to contain at least one Unicode letter.

3. The method according to claim 2 , wherein the address comprises a Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”).

4. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the OCR identification is performed by:

capturing a screenshot including an image of data displayed on a display screen of the computing device; and

processing the image to identify characters defining the original electronic address.

5. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the processing is performed in accordance with an encoding technique that generates a string in pure ASCII form.

6. The method according to claim 5 , wherein the encoding technique comprises Unicode encoding.

7. The method according to claim 5 , wherein the encoding technique comprises Punycode encoding.

8. The method according to claim 1 , wherein a determination is made that a Unicode homograph spoofing situation exist when the modified access address is not equal to or does not match the modified OCR electronic address.

9. A method for anti-spoofing, comprising:

obtaining, by a computing device, a first electronic address for a resource;

using, by the computing device, optical character recognition to obtain a second electronic address for the resource which is displayed to a user;

converting, by the computing device, a format of at least one of the first and second electronic addresses from a first format to a second different format;

comparing the first electronic address to the second electronic address after said converting; and

determining whether a spoofing situation exists based on results of the comparing.

10. The method according to claim 9 , wherein the first electronic address comprises a Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”), and the second electronic address comprises an Optical Character Recognition (“OCR”) electronic address.

11. The method according to claim 9 , wherein the first format comprises a Unicode format, and the second format comprises an ASCII format.

12. The method according to claim 9 , wherein the spoofing situation is determined to exist when the first electronic address does not match the second electronic address.

13. The method according to claim 9 , further comprising allowing, by the computing device, access to the resource when a determination is made that the spoofing situation does not exist.

14. The method according to claim 9 , further comprising blocking, by the computing device, access to the resource when a determination is made that the spoofing situation exists.

15. A system, comprising:

a processor;

a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium comprising programming instructions that are configured to cause the processor to implement a method for anti-spoofing, wherein the programming instructions comprise instructions to:

obtain a first electronic address for a resource;

use, optical character recognition to obtain a second electronic address for the resource which is displayed to a user;

convert a format of at least one of the first and second electronic addresses from a first format to a second different format;

compare the first electronic address to the second electronic address after said converting; and

determine whether a spoofing situation exists based on results of the comparing.

16. The system according to claim 15 , wherein the first electronic address comprises a Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”), and the second electronic address comprises an Optical Character Recognition (“OCR”) electronic address.

17. The system according to claim 15 , wherein the first format comprises a Unicode format, and the second format comprises an ASCII format.

18. The system according to claim 15 , wherein the spoofing situation is determined to exist when the first electronic address does not match the second electronic address.

19. The system according to claim 15 , wherein the programming instructions further comprise instructions to allow access to the resource when a determination is made that the spoofing situation does not exist.

20. The system according to claim 15 , wherein the programming instructions further comprise instructions to block access to the resource when a determination is made that the spoofing situation exists.