I have good faith that they didn't, or certainly not all of them. When Alex described the entire process they went through, he also smirked that should that primary key ever get compromised they have several others, almost as good, ready as drop-in replacements.
I do think he also mentioned that they only cared about keys that had their required prefix; all others were destroyed without anyone ever having access to them.
> I do think he also mentioned that they only cared about keys that had their required prefix; all others were destroyed without anyone ever having access to them.
Okay, that is what I was implying would be terrible otherwise. But actually it is quite obvious that they would not spend the disk space necessary the keep every single generated key pairs now that I think about it.
The number of generated key pair to find "facebook" + keywords must have been gigantic, maybe even so much that it could be used as a kind of rainbow table which would allow people (or three letters agencies) who can access it to attack hidden services that use one of the .onion for which a corresponding private key is known.
Nope. They ran a cluster to generate billions of addresses, and used some logic to find a nice one. But that won't help them a bit to find a specific address, since all the addresses they generated are only a vanishingly small fraction of the possible addresses.
That shouldn't matter. If the scheme is vulnerable when some company generates a bunch of keys, it is vulnerable whether those keys are deleted or not.
I do think he also mentioned that they only cared about keys that had their required prefix; all others were destroyed without anyone ever having access to them.