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voidnullnil | 4 years ago

To take this one step further: Adding surprise semantics like capturing time (and the dev not being aware of it) will lead to security vulnerabilities (side channels because the code is essentially timestamping when various parts of the code are hit) as well as privacy issues (PII leaking, clock skew leaking, whatever).

My thesis is that computers are so full of unwanted unneeded things like this that there is no engineer who knows them all as well as having a good understanding software engineering as well as infosec. Most vulnerabilities are due to lack of understanding how the primitives work, as opposed to flaws in reasoning (the former is clearly distinct: the summary provided to save him from spending a month looking at the implementation is inadequate).

I have designed UUIDs myself and they are simply a long random bitstring. The random part is already necessary because we need sufficient randomness for crypto to work in the first place. IETF likes to "engineer" things.

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