Attacks on Onion Discovery and Remedies via Self-Authenticating Traditional Addresses
Paul F. Syverson, Matthew Finkel, Saba Eskandarian, Dan Boneh · 2021
Onion addresses encode their own public key. They are thus self-authenticating, one of the security and privacy advantages of onion services, which are typically accessed via Tor Browser. Because of the mostly random-looking appearance of onion addresses, a number of onion discovery mechanisms have been created to permit routing to an onion address associated with a more meaningful URL, such as a registered domain name.