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by PeterisP
1842 days ago
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As soon as those IDs are used by any other people or business processes in any way whatsoever, their usability starts to matter and arguably in most cases is simply more relevant than a minor hypothetical advantage to an attacker. For example, if some customer ID is used by customers in communication e.g. when calling you on the phone over some billing issue, then there would be strong advantages if your IDs aren't unnecessarily long and if they include some explicit redundancy (e.g. a check-digit with Luhn formula) to protect against communication mistakes. For another example, if your IDs aren't visible to outsiders but are used in your internal business processes then it may be quite valuable to ensure that IDs of different types (e.g. customer ID vs account ID vs transaction ID) are obviously distinguishable in some way so that someone seeing XXXXXXX knows that it likely is a transaction ID and definitely can't be a customer ID; and it's quite valuable to ensure that you can't have accidental collisions where the same number is a valid ID in different key tables so a bug or miscommunication that confuses them would result in data corruption or information disclosure instead of simply failing. So "ID design" deserves some attention from UX perspective and blocks of random data aren't optimal UX. |
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