Bitsquatting: New Risks for Domain Name Owners

For owners of expensive domain names, there is a whole new cause for concern: "bit squatting."

Imperfect internet hardware, it turns out, could be fertile ground for a new kind of typosquatting that could cause concern for many companies.

According to research by security experts, high temperatures or radiation can sometimes cause RAM chips to malfunction and cause a "bit flip," causing a 1 to become a 0 or vice versa.

Because DNS uses ASCII encoding, a request containing a single flipped bit could actually redirect the user to a completely different domain name than the one they intended to visit.

To test the theory, security experts registered the domain name mic2osoft.com. Although it's not immediately obvious visually, the difference between this name and microsoft.com in binary is only one bit.

In binary ASCII, the digit 2 (00110010) is only one bit different from the lowercase letter “r” (01110010).

The binary string "microsoft" looks like this:

011011010110100101100011011100100110111101110011011011110110011001110100

and the binary code for "mic2osoft" is:

011011010110100101100011001100100110111101110011011011110110011001110100

So if one bit is accidentally flipped by a faulty chip, a user could unsuspectingly send their data to a bit-squatter domain instead of to the official Microsoft website.

It would seem that statistically this is only a concern for very high traffic domains, and only if bit flip issues are fairly widespread.

But security experts think it's a serious enough problem to warrant attention.