Sun awarded patent to detect spoofed domains and send web users to intended domain name.

Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) has been awarded U.S. patent 7,559,085 for “Detection for deceptively similar domain names”. The patent was filed in 2004 and awarded today.

The system includes a number of methods for detecting that someone is accessing a spoofed domain name and redirecting them to the correct domain name. For example, a web user may click on an email containing the web address 1BM.com, which is spoofing IBM.com.

The patent application cites the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), which can contain non-roman characters, as one enabler of spoofed domain names.

There are a couple ways the system could detect and redirect a web user. In one case, the web user may have software on his or her machine that remembers frequently visited web sites. If they click a link to a similar web site, the local software would determine it to be a spoof and redirect the user to the correct domain or alert the user. In another case, a DNS server cache or internet service would determine if the domain was a spoof. This could include a system that uses web site traffic data to determine the most likely domain name the user meant to visit.

View the patent here (pdf).

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