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“Google Logo Ligature Bug” by jefftk
Jeffrey Yasskin recently
pointed
out an
interesting
security bug:
The idea is, if you had registered googlelogoligature.net
then Chrome on Android (and possibly other Google products) would have
displayed it as Google.net, potentially tricking users
into thinking they were really interacting with Google.
To see how this worked, you can try searching Google for ["googlelogoligature"],
and you'll see it shows up as "Google":
Poking in devtools, this is dependent on the specific font they're
using, "Google Sans". If I turn that off my "googlelogoligature"
shows just as I typed it:
Fonts can include "ligatures", which let font designers special-case
specific combinations of letters. These were intended to support
things like "f" followed by "i" blending into "fi" nicely, but the
feature has been (ab)used for many other things, including complex [...]
---
First published:
May 18th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MGGm8B7StJtbhQs56/google-logo-ligature-bug
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
View all episodes
By LessWrongJeffrey Yasskin recently
pointed
out an
interesting
security bug:
The idea is, if you had registered googlelogoligature.net
then Chrome on Android (and possibly other Google products) would have
displayed it as Google.net, potentially tricking users
into thinking they were really interacting with Google.
To see how this worked, you can try searching Google for ["googlelogoligature"],
and you'll see it shows up as "Google":
Poking in devtools, this is dependent on the specific font they're
using, "Google Sans". If I turn that off my "googlelogoligature"
shows just as I typed it:
Fonts can include "ligatures", which let font designers special-case
specific combinations of letters. These were intended to support
things like "f" followed by "i" blending into "fi" nicely, but the
feature has been (ab)used for many other things, including complex [...]
---
First published:
May 18th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MGGm8B7StJtbhQs56/google-logo-ligature-bug
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
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