PAN-OS URL Filtering with Internationalized Domain Names (Asian, Cyrillic, Hebrew, etc. characters)

The PAN-OS URL filtering supports Internationalized Domain Names.

• Any PAN-OS.
• Palo Alto Firewall.

DNS only supports ASCII-characters. All non-ASCII-character encodings are supported via puny-code, which is supported by Palo Alto Networks URL filtering. Puny-code is an encoding syntax by which a Unicode (UTF-8) string of characters can be translated into a basic ASCII-character string, which is permitted in network host names.

For example, when "http://見.香港/" is entered into a web browser, the browser (which is IDNA-enabled application) first converts the string to the puny-code, http://xn--nw2a.xn--j6w193g/, because the characters "見.香港" are not allowed in regular domain names.

Example of online tools:

• International Domain Name (IDN) conversion tool by Verisign
• Lookup utility that supports IDNs by WhoIs