vanissh

Vanity SSH public key finder. Specify a pattern (e.g. hello), and this tool will generate random ed25519 SSH key pairs, until this pattern is found in the base64-encoded SSH public key.

vanissh uses the maximum degree of parallelism to find your desired keypair as quickly as possible.

About Vanity Keys

A vanity SSH key is a keypair where the base64-encoded public key contains a specific substring of your choice. This makes your public key more recognizable and memorable, though it provides no additional security.

Performance Considerations

The time required to find a matching keypair grows exponentially with pattern length:

• 5 characters (case-insensitive): ~10-60 seconds
• 6 characters (case-insensitive): ~5-15 minutes
• 5 characters (case-sensitive): ~5-30 minutes
• 6 characters (case-sensitive): ~5-16 hours

Actual time depends on your CPU cores and generation speed (typically 60k-170k keys/sec per core).

Usage

Usage: vanissh [OPTIONS] <PATTERN>
Arguments:
 <PATTERN>
 The pattern to search for. On completion, vanissh will return an ed25519 SSH keypair, where pattern is a substring of the public key
Options:
 -c, --case-sensitive
 Whether to make the pattern search case-sensitive. Note, that this will exponentially increase the search time by a factor of 2 * `length_of(pattern)`
 -h, --help
 Print help (see a summary with '-h')
 -V, --version
 Print version

The resulting key pair is placed in a folder found-keys/, relative to the directory in which you executed vanissh.