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

2025-07-16

AI Summary

Vanity address generation in blockchain systems relies on brute-force search, making it infeasible to embed long custom strings. Method: This paper proposes a semantics-aware address construction scheme compatible with existing ECDSA infrastructure. Leveraging ECDSA key recovery, it introduces a lightweight Identity-Based Signature (IBS) framework that deterministically maps arbitrary strings (e.g., usernames) to cryptographically verifiable public keys—thereby binding addresses to semantic identifiers via provable cryptographic linkage. The scheme requires no modifications to transaction signing or consensus protocols and is fully compatible with Ethereum and other ECDSA-based blockchains. Contribution/Results: A Solidity smart contract implementation demonstrates verification overhead comparable to standard ECDSA, with empirically validated gas costs confirming practical deployability. This work is the first to apply the IBS paradigm to vanity address generation, overcoming traditional limitations in string length and computational efficiency while preserving full backward compatibility.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Semantic Web
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Cryptocurrency and smart contracts
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies
• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

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.

Problem

• Exploring IBS for vanity address generation in blockchain
• Addressing limitations of classical try-and-error vanity methods
• Reducing gas costs while maintaining ECDSA security

Innovation

• Uses identity-based signatures for vanity addresses
• Constructs IBS scheme from ECDSA with key recovery
• Implements system in Solidity with low gas cost