Interesting domain name patent application — Morgan Stanley’s

Firm proposes a way to determine if a domain name might trick web users.

I often come across domain name-related patent applications filed by internet security firms. But it was interesting to see financial services firm Morgan Stanley file one.

The firm filed application number 16/059707 (pdf) for “Optically Analyzing Domain Names” in 2018 and it was just published on February 13, 2020.

The patent covers a method of analyzing if a domain name might trick a user, thus making the domains phishing candidates.

Consider a name that swaps in ‘cl’ for ‘d’. Optically, these are very similar. But a scanning tool based only on closeness of letters might overlook it. The same goes for internationalized domain names (IDNs).

Morgan Stanley proposes changing the text of a domain name into images with various fonts and distortions, and then using OCR to convert that image back into text. Then a system can analyze similarity to target URLs.