[tor-dev] [RFC] Proposal for the encoding of prop224 onion addresses

Tue Jan 24 17:02:41 UTC 2017

   Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2017 12:40:00 +0000
   From: segfault <segfault at riseup.net>

   But maybe it would help to separate them into groups of 4 characters,
   separated maybe by a dash, which would make them look like this:

       tbi5-tdxb-osio-tpha-wjyu-7f5p-w5tl-nvbv-fjrj-7mes-kbsn-wr2b-qbu2-t4gg.onion

This exceeds the maximum length of a DNS label, 63 octets[1].  One
could use larger groups to avoid that, of course -- e.g., with eight
octets per group you get down to 62:

tbi5tdxb-osiotpha-wjyu7f5p-w5tlnvbv-fjrj7mes-kbsnwr2b-qbu2t4gg.onion

[1] P. Mockapetris, `Domain Names - Concepts and Facilities',
RFC 1034, IETF, 1987, Sec. 3.1 `Name space specifications and
terminology', p. 7.
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1034.txt