h3h66vql4ucodjre4bluwtywhoq2bjqxpgvxgv2xo2nkui5ney6gslqd.onionWhat the string reports
Computed fields
- Full address
- h3h66vql4ucodjre4bluwtywhoq2bjqxpgvxgv2xo2nkui5ney6gslqd.onion
- Characters before .onion
- 56
- Characters including suffix
- 62
- Alphabet check
- pass · no 0, 1, 8 or 9
- Letters
- 46
- Digits
- 10 · 17.9% of the string
- Distinct symbols used
- 27 of 32
- Symbols never used
- a f m z 7
- Most frequent symbol
- q · 4 times
- Longest run of one character
- 2 · 6
- Opens with the market name
- no
- Longest prefix shared with another address here
- 0 · none
The head does all the work and deserves none of the trust
Look at how this one opens. A letter, a digit, the same letter again, then a doubled digit. In five characters it produces something that feels arranged, as though somebody chose it. Nobody did. It is the output of a key encoding, and the alternation is the sort of thing that turns up constantly once you look at enough random strings.
The reason this matters is that the head is the part of an address that carries the entire practical burden of recognition. Directories abbreviate to the first eight characters. People say the first four out loud. Bookmarks get named after them. When somebody says they have the right TorZon market address, what they almost always mean is that the beginning matched.
And the beginning is the cheapest part of a string to imitate. Grinding candidate keys until one produces a chosen four or five character opening is a job of minutes on ordinary hardware. Grinding for eight is a serious undertaking. Grinding for the whole 56 is not possible. So the section of the address people rely on most heavily is precisely the section an attacker can afford to control, and the section nobody reads is the section an attacker cannot touch.
A front-loaded string like this one makes the trap easier to fall into, because digits early on give a false sense that the string has been examined. Digits are distinctive. A reader who has registered h3h66 feels they have done real work. They have done five characters of work on a check that needs 56.
The three zones of this string
Three digits in the head, two in the middle and one in the final eight. Five of the 32 symbols never appear anywhere in this string.
| Zone | Characters | Value | Digits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Head | 1 to 8 | h3h66vql | 3 |
| Middle | 21 to 40 | wtywhoq2bjqxpgvxgv2x | 2 |
| Tail | 49 to 56 | ey6gslqd | 1 |
Questions
Is an alternating opening like h3h66 generated on purpose?
No. Nothing selects for readable openings. Patterns of that size appear regularly in random strings and mean nothing about the key or the operator.
How many leading characters would somebody need to match to fool a reader?
In practice four or five, because that is roughly what people check. That is also roughly the range that is cheap to grind, which is the whole problem.