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Comment by BillinghamJ | Hacker News Reader

>Having any information, specifically time information, leaking from your systems may or may not have unanticipated security or business implications. (e.g. knowing when session tokens or accounts are created).

I don't think this is really true? These are not serially incrementing, they just indicate the time it happened. If you have an ID that you know exists, having the ability to know _when_ it was created is very rarely meaningful.

What could present more of a risk is being able to predict a large part of IDs that will be created. Even then though, you shouldn't depend on your IDs for secrecy - best to ensure the IDs are never used as protection by themselves (ie treat them like they're just a simple autoincrementing number, even if they're not)

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One real world security problem is the "elder account" problem: as the age of an account increases the likelihood increases that it uses an insecure old password and/or that the account owner isn't paying as much attention to the account in the present. Depending on what the account represents age may also imply more "value" in the account. (Including just "sentimentality" value in the case of ransom operations, not just financial value.) Being able to tell from an ID alone that an account is at least X years older than some other ID in the system can be a handy way to find "potentially high value/low security" accounts to focus on to social engineer.

There are certainly mitigations that can be made and not all things are equally valuable as they age. (Plus many public APIs include created/modified timestamps anyway. The information is often easy to discover even when not embedded in an ID.) I don't find it a strong reason to avoid timestamp-based IDs for the threat models of that many things beyond user accounts and other things susceptible for social engineering, but it is something to keep aware of.

One business implication is that third parties can detect whether your sales increase or decrease from sampling those IDs (a variation on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem)

But how?

You would be correct if the ID were an integer being serially increased. I can sign up to your website today and get an ID X and then sign up again in a week and get ID Y, I can then calculate the number of new users you've had by performing Y-X.

If this ID is a timestamp then there's no such information I can get out of it from a small sample. I sign up today and get todays timestamp, then I sign up next week and get next weeks timestamp..?

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