Phobos randomUUID is not suitable to generate secrets

[Cym13]

On Monday, 31 August 2020 at 14:02:00 UTC, wjoe wrote:
> On Monday, 31 August 2020 at 07:49:24 UTC, Cym13 wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Very insightful article, thank you.
>
> I don't think the right approach to solve any problem is to 
> silently support misuse.
>
> A better way, IMHO, would be to
> 1) Add a generateSecret() function to Phobos, and
> 2) Add a Warning to the docs and the use of the function that 
> says something like: "A Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) is 
> *not* a secret and shouldn't be used as such. This includes 
> session cookies, password reset tokens, etc.. For such purposes 
> use generateSecret() instead. This message can be disabled by 
> providing version=IUnderstandThatUUIDsAreNotSecrets", and
> 3) Silently implement randomUUID() to use generateSecret() 
> because people aren't listening.
>
> I believe a big part of any solution is to destroy assumptions 
> and to make people aware of their misconceptions/mistakes.

It's not a bad battleplan even though a warning at function use 
might be a bit cumbersome :) One of my favourite initiatives for 
security, all languages considered, is Python's standard module 
"secrets" (see [1]). It exposes very few things: 1) the system's 
CSPRNG, 2) various token generators (for example a binary one and 
a url-base64 encoded one to reduced encoding mistakes) and 3) a 
constant-time string comparison function. That's it. Most of 
these things are actually defined elsewhere. But it worked well 
and now whenever a python project requires something that has to 
do with manipulating secrets people are redirected toward that 
module where they can use stuff with minimal chance to get it 
wrong.

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/secrets.html