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No argument given for why having a slower algorithm to generate random ids is more secure.

If the algorithm is too fast it means you can detect when some other part of the system is having a significant impact on how the key is returned. Eg checking a database to see if a user exists and returning their key versus getting null back and generating a new key. That difference can be used to determine if a user exists. You want your key gen process to be slow enough that it's a significant part of the process, which makes timing attacks hard.



This doesn’t make sense. If you’re going to generate a new key if the user doesn’t exist then you’re creating a new user anyway, so there’s no hidden information. Unless you mean that the system should return a bogus id instead of a status 40X when the user doesn’t exist, which makes even less sense.

ID generation should usually only happen when creating new assets, so it should be as fast as possible.




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