4 ms·
Not disagreeing with the general concept - these IDs leak information - but these are sequential IDs, not auto-incrementing IDs. The leak is the time the ID was
by madeofpalk 3y ago
Not disagreeing with the general concept - these IDs leak information - but these are sequential IDs, not auto-incrementing IDs. The leak is the time the ID was generated, not the volume of IDs generated.
- crazygringo 3y agoThat's still a competitive risk -- it does things like reveal if a given list of customers from recent orders/posts are all new customers or long-term customers. Or from a list of most recently added customers/users, you can figure out the rate of signups. Revealing timestamps is bad because it can reveal way too much information about the health of your business that you prefer to keep private, if a sequential list of ID's ever gets exposed (which is hard to prevent).
- pnpnp 3y agoThey’re not even strongly sequential (is there a term for this?). The gaps between them can be arbitrarily large.
- madeofpalk 3y agoThey are sequential, where they are in a sequence where one is clearly before or after another. They're not monotonic.
- pnpnp 3y agoThanks! This is what I was looking for.