I’ve been playing around with .onion domain names for a while, tried various hash generator tools and get, more or less, custom domain names.

There are multiple tools out there to hash generate but the one that works better for me is, with no doubt, scallion.

Scallion lets you create vanity GPG keys and .onion addresses (for Tor’s hidden services) using OpenCL.

What are valid characters?

  • Tor .onion addresses use Base32, consisting of all letters and the digits 2 through 7, inclusive. They are case-insensitive.
  • GPG fingerprints use hexadecimal, consisting of the digits 0-9 and the letters A-F.

The main reason for preferring scallion to other tools is basically because it is GPU-based, obviously under Windows (linux has several issues with graphic card drivers).

If you are interested on generating your own .onion domain name, you can follow these simple steps:

  • Download scallion
  • Unzip the gpg.zip file
  • Download and install Visual Studio Express
  • Download and intall mono
  • Open ‘scallion.sln’ in Visual Studio Express
  • Build the solution, I did everything in debug mode.

Once all the above steps are completed, open a terminal and use these commands:

  • List devices:
$ mono scallion/bin/Debug/scallion.exe -l
  • Generate a hash:
$ mono C:\path\scallion.exe name_you_want_to_generate

SHA1 hashing is done on the GPU. The hashrates for several GPUs that have been tested are below:

GPU Speed
nVidia Quadro K2000M 90 MH/s
AMD Radeon HD5770 520 MH/s
AMD Radeon HD6850 600 MH/s
NVIDIA GTS 250 128 MH/s
Intel i7-2620M 9.9 MH/s
NVIDIA GTX 970 2350 MH/s

*MH/s = million hashes per second

Enjoy your vanity .onion addresses.