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+This document outlines the format for human-readable IDs within matrix.
+
+Overview
+--------
+UTF-8 is quickly becoming the standard character encoding set on the web. As
+such, Matrix requires that all strings MUST be encoded as UTF-8. However,
+using Unicode as the character set for human-readable IDs is troublesome. There
+are many different characters which appear identical to each other, but would
+identify different users. In addition, there are non-printable characters which
+cannot be rendered by the end-user. This opens up a security vulnerability with
+phishing/spoofing of IDs, commonly known as a homograph attack.
+
+Web browers encountered this problem when International Domain Names were
+introduced. A variety of checks were put in place in order to protect users. If
+an address failed the check, the raw punycode would be displayed to disambiguate
+the address. Similar checks are performed by home servers in Matrix. However, 
+Matrix does not use punycode representations, and so does not show raw punycode 
+on a failed check. Instead, home servers must outright reject these misleading 
+IDs.
+
+Types of human-readable IDs
+---------------------------
+There are two main human-readable IDs in question:
+
+- Room aliases
+- User IDs
+ 
+Room aliases look like ``#localpart:domain``. These aliases point to opaque
+non human-readable room IDs. These pointers can change, so there is already an
+issue present with the same ID pointing to a different destination at a later
+date.
+
+User IDs look like ``@localpart:domain``. These represent actual end-users, and
+unlike room aliases, there is no layer of indirection. This presents a much
+greater concern with homograph attacks. 
+
+Checks
+------
+- Similar to web browsers.
+- blacklisted chars (e.g. non-printable characters)
+- mix of language sets from 'preferred' language not allowed. 
+- Language sets from CLDR dataset.
+- Treated in segments (localpart, domain)
+- Additional restrictions for ease of processing IDs.
+   - Room alias localparts MUST NOT have ``#`` or ``:``.
+   - User ID localparts MUST NOT have ``@`` or ``:``.
+
+Rejecting
+---------
+- Home servers MUST reject room aliases which do not pass the check, both on 
+  GETs and PUTs.
+- Home servers MUST reject user ID localparts which do not pass the check, both
+  on creation and on events.
+- Any home server whose domain does not pass this check, MUST use their punycode
+  domain name instead of the IDN, to prevent other home servers rejecting you.
+- Error code is ``M_FAILED_HUMAN_ID_CHECK``. (generic enough for both failing 
+  due to homograph attacks, and failing due to including ``:`` s, etc)
+- Error message MAY go into further information about which characters were
+  rejected and why.
+- Error message SHOULD contain a ``failed_keys`` key which contains an array
+  of strings which represent the keys which failed the check e.g::
+  
+    failed_keys: [ user_id, room_alias ]
+  
+Other considerations
+--------------------
+- Basic security: Informational key on the event attached by HS to say "unsafe 
+  ID". Problem: clients can just ignore it, and since it will appear only very
+  rarely, easy to forget when implementing clients.
+- Moderate security: Requires client handshake. Forces clients to implement
+  a check, else they cannot communicate with the misleading ID. However, this is
+  extra overhead in both client implementations and round-trips.
+- High security: Outright rejection of the ID at the point of creation / 
+  receiving event. Point of creation rejection is preferable to avoid the ID
+  entering the system in the first place. However, malicious HSes can just allow
+  the ID. Hence, other home servers must reject them if they see them in events.
+  Client never sees the problem ID, provided the HS is correctly implemented.
+- High security decided; client doesn't need to worry about it, no additional
+  protocol complexity aside from rejection of an event.
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