Rails - Feb 2006 - Using Random Longer Non-Sequential IDs

Instead of using sequential integers for IDs for my objects I was  
wondering if I could easily make it so that my IDs where longer auto- 
generated random strings/integers.

So instead of:
http://www.mydomain.com/user/view/1

Would be:

http://www.mydomain.com/user/view/d81096b87a7c5565f

On top of that... is there big benefits for security reasons to use  
non-sequential numbers?  Is it worth it?

Thanks :-)

John Kopanas
http://www.kopanas.com


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On Feb 12, 2006, at 3:17 PM, John Kopanas wrote:
> On top of that... is there big benefits for security reasons to use  
> non-sequential numbers?  Is it worth it?
No, security through obscurity will just give you a false sense of  
security.

-- 
-- Tom Mornini

On Sunday, February 12, 2006, at 6:17 PM, John Kopanas
wrote:
>Instead of using sequential integers for IDs for my objects I was
>wondering if I could easily make it so that my IDs where longer
>auto-generated random strings/integers.
>
>So instead of:
>http://www.mydomain.com/user/view/1
>
>Would be:
>
>http://www.mydomain.com/user/view/d81096b87a7c5565f
>
>On top of that... is there big benefits for security reasons to use
>non-sequential numbers?  Is it worth it?
>
>Thanks :-)
>
>John Kopanas
>http://www.kopanas.com
>
>
>====================================================================>http://www.soen.info
- source of the freshest software engineering
>information on the net
>http://cusec.soen.info - software engineering conference
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Rails mailing list
>Rails@lists.rubyonrails.org
>http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
You can add an extra column to your table and generate random unique id  
(unique secondary key). We used this approach to display order pages on  
http://www.palmsphere.com

Best Regards, Roustem.


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