Vanity .onion address

Support Onion Services
1

I am relatively new to .onion domain names, and have already tried to generate a few names using the /etc/tor/torrc file as such:

HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service1/
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80

HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service2/
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80

and am considering finding a vanity address by adding lines in this file by adding i.e. 100 or so hidden services and simply deleting the hidden service folders I do not like, then restart.

…
HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_serviceN/
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80

i.e. cat /var/lib/tor/hidden_service*/hostname > /root/current.onions

Then if none are ok, simply delete all hidden services by simply
rm -Rf /var/lib/tor/hidden_service*

and service tor@default restart

Is this an acceptable method, or is there some way to announce that I will drop the hidden service addresses before doing so. Or is it any better way I can do this?

I am aware of several projects such as

However, am not searching for any particular first few characters - only an address that looks good, so I do not think those are correct for me for now.

2

You could just use one of the generators you listed and generate vanity addresses starting with e.g. ‘a’ and then choose among the many results.

2 Likes
3

Thanks Leibi,
In fact, I ended up going that path when realizing the domain name is an base32 encoding of the sites public key. It generated so many results that I flooded a directory with names… I then ended up trying with longer words even though it for me did not matter much whether domain had a good name somewhere in the middle of the name or not. It was quite fast finding even 6 letter combinations, so I am good!

1 Like
4

@kandresen , I’m in the same cae as you.
Did you found a good way to generate a vanity address ?

5

I don’t see the point of vanity addresses: just use subdomains to add human-readable information.

For instance, I operate a single-hop onion service for my clearnet domain. This is what one of my Onion-Location headers points to:

http://openpgpkey.saklad5.com.7fozcw7rp6flsw7al53wnbif5fz3bnqb6tot5hnljhidlrx22oktnjqd.onion

This makes it extremely obvious what the onion address is meant to correspond to, without any dumb tricks.