[tor-dev] IMPT -- Re: Future Onion Addresses and Human Factors

[Nick Mathewson]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 11:59 AM, Alec Muffett <alecm at fb.com> wrote:
> Aside: in pursuit of helping Jake register “.onion” as a "special name” in
> an RFC, I am currently being beaten-up on the IETF discussion mail-list
> regards the potential future length of onion addresses, and that they may
> possibly exceed the bounds of DNS’ maximum label length of 63 characters:
>
> https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg94332.html
>
> The examples in Proposal 224 are a mere 53 characters long leaving 10 to
> play with for padding-hyphens and possibly checksum characters.
>
> Nick: Is this likely to need to change? Or might there be a need to encode >
> 315 bits / 63 chars total?

I don't anticipate this changing.

If there were ever a need to encode more than that number of bits,
we'd add an extra label.