4 ms·

What a coincidence! Just today I used the sequential ID numbers of a companies deployment to work out their user numbers, it's interesting to compare things lik

What a coincidence! Just today I used the sequential ID numbers of a companies deployment to work out their user numbers, it's interesting to compare things like that with reported figures. I wonder what the best approach to it is (when protecting those numbers) maybe something like Twitter where they would take a chunk of numbers and then stagger deployment through those numbers (If I remember correctly, I'm not all that familiar with their system)

pauldino 16y ago
One thought I've had is encrypting sequential IDs with DES. The block size is 64 bits which conveniently maps to int types and the token you get is half the size of a UUID.
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago
  > DES Almost anything involving that word, including your proposal, is a bad idea.
  - tbrownaw 16y ago
    Would you care to enlighten us as to how?
    - JoachimSchipper 16y ago
      DES' key is short enough to brute-force (see below for time/cost). It's not tremendously difficult to obtain some output samples: make the first account, you now know DES(key, 0), where key is the actual key used by the site. Then run through all 2^56 keys k until DES(k, 0) = DES(key, 0); for some extra assurance, you could also check DES(k, 1) = DES(key, 1) by making another account. Once you have key, the proposed scheme is no better than sequential account numbers. This gets slightly more difficult if you don't know your account id; in that case, simply create a couple of accounts immediately after each other (script it), and check whether DES(k, i) = DES(key, counter), DES(k, i + 1) = DES(key, counter + 1) etcetera, where again key is the real key, counter is the real counter at the time of creation of the first account. You now have to bruteforce counter (i) as well as key (k), but that's still doable. Brute-forcing DES is not easy on a desktop, but http://www.sciengines.com/copacobana/faq.html http://www.sciengines.com/copacobana/faq.html offers a $10,000 off-the-shelf solution that can break DES in 8.7 days (source: their presentation at CHES 2006). Note that this is uses components from 2006 and that it's easy to trade cost for speed (i.e. just buy half as many boards.) The above is the most obvious attack; I'm in no way saying there are no others. It's not impossible to make schemes like the above work (e.g. using the pair (AES(key1, id), HMAC(key2, AES(key1, id))) and a good library); but even the scheme proposed is more complex than just picking random account numbers.
      - Poiesis 16y ago
        Surely for a startup this sort of information is not worth $10000? It just seems like you've got so many more important things to worry about than to worry if someone,s going to spend thousands of dollars figuring out how many users you have (which is likely an effect, not a cause, of any competitive advantage).
        JoachimSchipper 16y ago
        If Moore's law holds and you're willing to wait a month instead of ~9 days, it costs <$1500 in hardware, and you can keep/resell that. Or, again, rent time. Or just use a distributed.net-esque approach and bruteforce using (a lot of) standard PCs. Or... Seriously, "people aren't going to hack us" is the new "premature optimization is the root of all evil": a convenient excuse to do it horribly wrong.
blaines 16y ago
A good solution for obfuscating/encoding ids: http://github.com/kylebragger/tiny http://github.com/kylebragger/tiny
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  I wouldn't call that a "good" solution per se, it's highly vulnerable to pre-computed table cracking (or merely discovering and making use of the algorithm).

pauldino 16y ago

One thought I've had is encrypting sequential IDs with DES. The block size is 64 bits which conveniently maps to int types and the token you get is half the size of a UUID.

JoachimSchipper 16y ago
> DES Almost anything involving that word, including your proposal, is a bad idea.
- tbrownaw 16y ago
  Would you care to enlighten us as to how?
  - JoachimSchipper 16y ago
    DES' key is short enough to brute-force (see below for time/cost). It's not tremendously difficult to obtain some output samples: make the first account, you now know DES(key, 0), where key is the actual key used by the site. Then run through all 2^56 keys k until DES(k, 0) = DES(key, 0); for some extra assurance, you could also check DES(k, 1) = DES(key, 1) by making another account. Once you have key, the proposed scheme is no better than sequential account numbers. This gets slightly more difficult if you don't know your account id; in that case, simply create a couple of accounts immediately after each other (script it), and check whether DES(k, i) = DES(key, counter), DES(k, i + 1) = DES(key, counter + 1) etcetera, where again key is the real key, counter is the real counter at the time of creation of the first account. You now have to bruteforce counter (i) as well as key (k), but that's still doable. Brute-forcing DES is not easy on a desktop, but http://www.sciengines.com/copacobana/faq.html http://www.sciengines.com/copacobana/faq.html offers a $10,000 off-the-shelf solution that can break DES in 8.7 days (source: their presentation at CHES 2006). Note that this is uses components from 2006 and that it's easy to trade cost for speed (i.e. just buy half as many boards.) The above is the most obvious attack; I'm in no way saying there are no others. It's not impossible to make schemes like the above work (e.g. using the pair (AES(key1, id), HMAC(key2, AES(key1, id))) and a good library); but even the scheme proposed is more complex than just picking random account numbers.
    - Poiesis 16y ago
      Surely for a startup this sort of information is not worth $10000? It just seems like you've got so many more important things to worry about than to worry if someone,s going to spend thousands of dollars figuring out how many users you have (which is likely an effect, not a cause, of any competitive advantage).
      - JoachimSchipper 16y ago
        If Moore's law holds and you're willing to wait a month instead of ~9 days, it costs <$1500 in hardware, and you can keep/resell that. Or, again, rent time. Or just use a distributed.net-esque approach and bruteforce using (a lot of) standard PCs. Or... Seriously, "people aren't going to hack us" is the new "premature optimization is the root of all evil": a convenient excuse to do it horribly wrong.

blaines 16y ago

A good solution for obfuscating/encoding ids: http://github.com/kylebragger/tiny http://github.com/kylebragger/tiny

InclinedPlane 16y ago
I wouldn't call that a "good" solution per se, it's highly vulnerable to pre-computed table cracking (or merely discovering and making use of the algorithm).