Homoglyphs are different unicode characters that to the naked eye look the same. An attacker could use homoglyphs to deceive a human reviewer by creating a malicious patch containing functions that look similar to standard library functions, such as print, but replace one character with a homoglyph. This function can then be defined in an upstream dependency to launch supply chain attacks.
Note: This is a flaw with the way unicode standards are implemented in the context of development environments, which have specialized requirements for rendering text. It is not a flaw in Red Hat products.
CVE-2021-42694 has been known for some time. Various upstream projects have been known to work on the homoglyphs issue for the last several years and are currently work under progress. https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/2457-non-ascii-idents.html https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/#Confusable_Detection