mimic

[ab]using Unicode to create tragedy

Introduction

mimic provokes:

• fun
• frustration
• curiosity
• murderous rage

It's inspired by this terrible idea floating around:

MT: Replace a semicolon (;) with a greek question mark (;) in your friend's C# code and watch them pull their hair out over the syntax error

— Peter Ritchie (@peterritchie) November 16, 2014

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There are many more characters in the Unicode character set that look, to some extent or another, like others - homographs. Mimic substitutes common ASCII characters for obscure homographs.

Fun games to play with mimic:

• Pipe some source code through and see if you can find all of the problems
• Pipe someone else's source code through without telling them
• Be fired, and then killed

Example usage

./mimic --list           # Show all of the homographs
./mimic --explain=o      # What crazy things can we do with this letter?
./mimic --me-harder 100  # Type some lines in and mess with every single char
./mimic --reverse        # Undo the mayhem. Boooring.
cat mimic | ./mimic      # Pipe the source through itself at 1%

# Turn up the knob and save the results
cat mimic | ./mimic --me-harder 25 > mimicked

# Or, if your code acts strange, but you have seen this prank before:
cat mimicked | ./mimic --reverse > unmimicked
diff unmimicked mimic

Results

Observe the mayhem:

"BUT WHY?"

Or, if you've been mimicked a little harder,

See also

[Wikipedia: Unicode Equivalence] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence)

Wikipedia: IDN homograph attack

Online homograph generator