Obfuscation

Obscurity

Have you heard the phrase: security through obscurity? It’s rarely true, but in some cases, helpful. Most applications use an ID field in each table as a primary key. This ID is then used throughout the system to access data. It is passed through URLs, forms, and APIs to denote the needed piece of data.

Sometimes, you don’t want to expose the user to the actual row ID. Maybe you are launching a new product and don’t want the user to know that they are only the 13th user. Perhaps you have public data but don’t want your site to be easily crawled by scraping bots.

In these cases, you can obfuscate the ID to something that isn’t incremental but can be translated to your ID field. Rather than doing this: You could do: