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by sgrenfro 4255 days ago
Also commented downthread, but we got extremely lucky then went the backronym route as shawabawa3 guessed. (I'm an engineer at FB.)
1 comments

That is extremely lucky. That's, what, 82 bits if you'd chosen the whole thing?

A more manageable 61 bits for 12 characters or so, from my recollection. Did you pile a dictionary attack on top of that?

I don't believe this does "break hidden services". That's just a truncated key fingerprint, not the key, and a collision would I suspect (but haven't checked) be a loudly visible error.

Roger Dingledine (Tor project, not FB) shared some accurate background here: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-October...
>That's just a truncated key fingerprint, not the key, and a collision would I suspect (but haven't checked) be a loudly visible error.

Actually, a name collision would still mean hijacking the traffic, even if they don't have the same private key. The last HS to announce "owns" the name.