Glossary
Definitions as this site uses them, which is not always how they are used elsewhere.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| v3 onion address | Fifty six characters of base32 plus the suffix, derived from an Ed25519 public key. Not assigned by anyone, cannot be seized, and proves nothing about who runs it. |
| Descriptor | The signed record a hidden service publishes so clients can find it. Publishing it fails routinely, which is the most common cause of an address going quiet for an hour. |
| Introduction point | A relay a service uses to be reached. They drop out of consensus regularly, and while replacements are chosen, connections fail. |
| Fingerprint | A short hash of a public key, comparable by eye. The thing you pin, as opposed to the key file, which is disposable. |
| Vanity generation | Repeatedly generating keypairs until an address starts with chosen characters. Cheap for a short prefix, impossible for a whole address, and the reason forgeries match the opening. |
| Near miss | An address matching the recognisable start of a real one and differing in the middle. What people mean when they say an address was cloned. |
| Replay | Presenting a genuine old signed statement as current. Signatures never expire, so this works unless you read the date inside the signed text. |
| Roster | The signed, published list of addresses currently in production. The only list whose contents can be established rather than believed. |
| Rotation | Retiring addresses and introducing new ones, with an overlap during which both work. Routine, never urgent, and never announced with a deadline. |
| Recycled address | A retired address, or a near miss of one, now answering under different ownership. The most dangerous state because it looks like everything working. |
| Grace window | The overlap during a rotation when outgoing and incoming addresses both work, so occasional visitors see both on the roster at once. |
| Aggregation | One directory copying another. Extremely common here, and why agreement between lists is much weaker evidence than it appears. |
| Gateway | A clearnet site that opens onion addresses on your behalf, and therefore reads everything you send. See why this is never safe. |
| Circuit | The path your client builds through relays. A bad one produces failures identical to a service being down, which is why building a new one is the first thing to try. |
Terms this site avoids
Dark web, which is a media coinage naming no network and describing nothing technical. Deep web, which means content not indexed by search engines and is mostly bank statements and intranets. Both appear in search queries, so they show up in a few page titles here, and neither is used in an explanation because neither has a definition precise enough to build an argument on.