11 ms·
If you don't want a machine ID to segment the counters: What if you use a PRNG to initially seed an incremental counter? I don't really see how that would that
by 0x0 11y ago
If you don't want a machine ID to segment the counters:
What if you use a PRNG to initially seed an incremental counter? I don't really see how that would that be weaker than using a PRNG for each value? Is it just that the obfuscated period and pattern of a PRNG makes it "feel" less likely to collide?
- Someone 11y agoIf you use a PRNG to seed an incremental counter on every node, and you get one collision, you are bound to get zillions of them. On the plus side, I think that means the risk that you get a collision is smaller. Also, using bare incrementing counters may be a bad idea for different reasons: it allows attackers to guess IDs of future messages. You can counteract that by hashing the IDs using a good cryptographic hash function, but that effectively turns your ID generating process into a PRNG.