Bitsquatting the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) Domain Names
The helper script bitsquatting.py generates (lowercase) permutations of an ENS domain that differ by 1-bit from the original domain.
What Is Bitsquatting
I borrowed this explanation from here.
Bitsquatting is DNS Hijacking without exploitation. A term coined by Artem Dinaburg to refer to the act of registering domains that are 1-bit off from some other legitimate domain in order to capture traffic that was destined for the legitimate domain but became corrupted and ended up on the alternate domain.
Bitsquatting is due to an error on the part of the connecting client machine and not anything the operator of a domain can explicitly protect against except by purchasing additional domains. The more popular a website is, the more likely a connecting client may accidentally connect to some other domain on accident.
This is due to corruption in memory (or potentially transmission) and it is distinct from a typo made by a user (and therefor different from the more well-known practice of typosquatting). A good candidate domain name for bitsquatting is one that is both popular and not one visited by a user explicitly (that is, a domain that is not commonly navigated to in a web browser by a user). For example, facebook.com would not be a good candidate but fbcdn.net would be as it is the domain Facebook uses to host static resources that are embedded on facebook.com.
Example wagmi.eth
Original ENS Name: wagmi.eth
1-Bit Permutations:
- 7agmi.eth
- wagmi.eth
- gagmi.eth
- agmi.eth
- sagmi.eth
- uagmi.eth
- vagmi.eth
- w!gmi.eth
- wagmi.eth
- wqgmi.eth
- wigmi.eth
- wegmi.eth
- wcgmi.eth
- w`gmi.eth
- wa'mi.eth
- wagmi.eth
- wawmi.eth
- waomi.eth
- wacmi.eth
- waemi.eth
- wafmi.eth
- wag-i.eth
- wagmi.eth
- wag}i.eth
- wagei.eth
- wagii.eth
- wagoi.eth
- wagli.eth
- wagm).eth
- wagmi.eth
- wagmy.eth
- wagma.eth
- wagmm.eth
- wagmk.eth
- wagmh.eth
Potential Attack Vector
The attacker could bitsquat popular ens domains, register them, and could receive a very small portion of the transactions meant for someone else.