Affected: servo rust-url

Improper Validation of Unsafe Equivalence in punycode by the idna crate from Servo rust-url allows an attacker to create a punycode hostname that one part of a system might treat as distinct while another part of that system would treat as equivalent to another hostname.

Affected: crates.io: idna

`idna` 0.5.0 and earlier accepts Punycode labels that do not produce any non-ASCII output, which means that either ASCII labels or the empty root label can be masked such that they appear unequal without IDNA processing or when processed with a different implementation and equal when processed with `idna` 0.5.0 or earlier.

Concretely, `example.org` and `xn--example-.org` become equal after processing by `idna` 0.5.0 or earlier. Also, `example.org.xn--` and `example.org.` become equal after processing by `idna` 0.5.0 or earlier.

In applications using `idna` (but not in `idna` itself) this may be able to lead to privilege escalation when host name comparison is part of a privilege check and the behavior is combined with a client that resolves domains with such labels instead of treating them as errors that preclude DNS resolution / URL fetching and with the attacker managing to introduce a DNS entry (and TLS certificate) for an `xn--`-masked name that turns into the name of the target when processed by `idna` 0.5.0 or earlier.

## Remedy

Upgrade to `idna` 1.0.3 or later, if depending on `idna` directly, or to `url` 2.5.4 or later, if depending on `idna` via `url`. (This issue was fixed in `idna` 1.0.0, but versions earlier than 1.0.3 are not recommended for other reasons.)

When upgrading, please take a moment to read about [alternative Unicode back ends for `idna`](https://docs.rs/crate/idna_adapter/latest).

If you are using Rust earlier than 1.81 in combination with SQLx…