>I see this "best practice" advocated often, but to me it reeks of security theater.
The idea of "security theater" is overplayed. Security can be (and should be) multilayered, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. So that, when they break a layer (say the authentication), they shouldn't automatically gain easy access to the others
>If an attacker is able to do anything useful with a guessed ID without being authenticated and authorized to do so, then something else has gone horribly, horribly, horribly wrong and that should be the focus of one's energy instead of adding needless complexity to the schema.
Sure. But by that time, it's will be game over if you don't also have the other layers in place.
The thing is that you can't anticipate any contigency. Bugs tend to not preannounce themselves, especially tricky nuanced bugs.
But when they do appear, and a user can "do [something] useful with an ID without being authenticated and authorized to do so" you'd be thanking all available Gods that you at least made the IDs not guassable - which would also give them also access to every user account on the system.
> Security can be (and should be) multilayered, it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
In this case the added layer is one of wet tissue paper, at best. Defense-in-depth is only effective when the different layers are actually somewhat secure in their own right.
It's like trying to argue that running encrypted data through ROT13 is worthwhile because "well it's another layer, right?".
> you'd be thanking all available Gods that you at least made the IDs not guassable - which would also give them also access to every user account on the system.
I wouldn't be thanking any gods, because no matter what those IDs look like, the only responsible thing in such a situation is to assume that an attacker does have access to every user account on the system. Moving from sequential IDs to something "hard" like UUIDs only delays the inevitable - and the extraordinarily narrow window in which that delay is actually relevant ain't worth considering in the grand scheme of things. Moving from sequential IDs to something like usernames ain't even really an improvement at all, but more of a tradeoff; yeah, you make life slightly harder for someone trying to target all users, but you also make life much easier for someone trying to target a specific user (since now the attacker can guess the username directly - say, based on other known accounts - instead of having to iterate through opaque IDs in the hopes of exposing said username).
>I wouldn't be thanking any gods, because no matter what those IDs look like, the only responsible thing in such a situation is to assume that an attacker does have access to every user account on the system. Moving from sequential IDs to something "hard" like UUIDs only delays the inevitable*
Well, there's nothing "inevitable". It's a computer system, not the fullfilment of some prophecy.
You can have an attack vector giving you access to a layer, without guaranteed magic access to other layers.
But even if it "just delays the inevitable", that's a very good thing, as it can be time used to patch the issue.
Not to mention, any kind of cryptography just "delays the inevitable" too. With enough time it can be broken with brute force - might not even take millions of years, as we could get better at quantum computing in the next 50 or 100.
> But even if it "just delays the inevitable", that's a very good thing, as it can be time used to patch the issue.
My point is that in this case, the additional time is nowhere near sufficient to make much of a difference. This is especially true when you consider that an attacker could be probing URLs before finding an exploit, in which case that tiny delay between "exploit found" -> "all users compromised" shrinks to zero.
The idea of "security theater" is overplayed. Security can be (and should be) multilayered, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. So that, when they break a layer (say the authentication), they shouldn't automatically gain easy access to the others
>If an attacker is able to do anything useful with a guessed ID without being authenticated and authorized to do so, then something else has gone horribly, horribly, horribly wrong and that should be the focus of one's energy instead of adding needless complexity to the schema.
Sure. But by that time, it's will be game over if you don't also have the other layers in place.
The thing is that you can't anticipate any contigency. Bugs tend to not preannounce themselves, especially tricky nuanced bugs.
But when they do appear, and a user can "do [something] useful with an ID without being authenticated and authorized to do so" you'd be thanking all available Gods that you at least made the IDs not guassable - which would also give them also access to every user account on the system.