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Well, did they generate keys they liked and then tried to use them immediately, hoping nobody had generated the same key in the meantime, or did they generate o
by cm3 11y ago
Well, did they generate keys they liked and then tried to use them immediately, hoping nobody had generated the same key in the meantime, or did they generate only keys they would like and "registered" them all but kept just one? If so, what happens to allocated but unused keys? What I'm trying to figure out is:
1. race condition?
2. waste of key space?
- SXX 11y ago1. You can't generate vanity you like, but you can generate billions of keys and choose one you like the most. 2. You can't "register" key. If some person manage to generate key with same vanity he can use same address as facebook, but practically this is nearly impossible. And if that happen this can be easily detected by facebook so they can just change official key.
- c22 11y agoThere's nowhere to register the key, tor is decentralized. They simply start conducting their business using the key they found. There's no waste of key space for the unused keys, merely a minuscule chance of collision with other random users. I guess you could think of attempting to find hash collisions as a race condition of sorts, but it is a very long race for the attacker.
- cm3 11y agoSo do we know the hash? I guess we don't or it would be easy for someone to pretend to be Facebook.
- c22 11y agoYes, the hash is "facebookcorewwwi", this is the hash of the public key of one of the keypairs facebook generated. We can't pretend to be facebook without knowledge of the corresponding private key, however. To make this more clear, most tor hidden service sites that don't have loads of computing power to bruteforce a vanity domain have uris that look like http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion