On the Consideration of Vanity Address Generation via Identity-Based Signatures

TL;DR

This paper explores using identity-based signatures derived from ECDSA with key recovery to generate vanity blockchain addresses embedding custom strings, aiming for flexible address customization without significant additional costs.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach to vanity address generation using IBS constructed from ECDSA with key recovery, avoiding the limitations of traditional try-and-error methods.

Findings

The proposed IBS scheme allows embedding custom strings into addresses.

Gas costs for the scheme are comparable to standard ECDSA verification.

The system is implemented in Solidity demonstrating practical feasibility.

Abstract

An address is indicated as an identifier of the user on the blockchain, and is defined by a hash value of the ECDSA verification key. A vanity address is an address that embeds custom characters such as a name. To generate a vanity address, a classical try-and-error method is employed, and thus the number of characters to be embedded is limited. In this paper, we focus on the functionality of identity-based signatures (IBS) where any strings can be employed as a verification key, and explore whether IBS can be used for generating a vanity address. We attach importance to the fact that it is not realistic to replace ECDSA with key recovery, which is currently employed for issuing transactions in Ethereum, to an IBS scheme. Even if this replacement is possible, it is not a reasonable price for the ease of the vanity address generation. Thus, we pay attention to a generic construction of IBS from signatures, and construct an IBS scheme from ECDSA with key recovery. Though we cannot directly generate a vanity address due to the key recovery functionality of the underlying ECDSA, we can connect any string with an address due to the functionality of IBS that can give additional meaning to the address. We implement our system by Solidity, and demonstrate that the gas cost is almost same as that of the ECDSA signature verification.