Idy

An ID obfuscator for ActiveRecord.

Description

Do not let your users knows about your IDs:

• IDs can make hacker's life easier for a sequential attack;
• IDs can make crawler's life easier for a sequential scan;
• With few records on your database it can seem that your business is weak;
• With many records on your database it can call attention of people.

Make it clean, make it lean, make it hidden.

http://example.com/articles/1 -> http://example.com/articles/My

It uses Hashids to make it pretty.

install

Add the following code on your Gemfile and run bundle install:

gem 'idy'

Usage

On an ActiveRecord model, just add idy callback:

class Article < ApplicationRecord
  idy
end

Try to call on your model the obfuscated ID:

Article.new(id: 1).idy
# My

It will build your Rails URL with that ID too:

Article.new(id: 1).to_param
# localhost:3000/articles/My

Security

Idy is not for encryption, it is about obfuscation. If you want a unbreakable hash, it is not for you.

Collision

To avoid two differents models to generates the same hash for the same ID, by default, the class name is used as a Salt.

Article.new(id: 1).idy
# My

User.new(id: 1).idy
# ex

Salt

You can provide you own:

class Article < ApplicationRecord
  idy salt: 's3cr3t'
end

Article.new(id: 1).idy
# 9A

Idy

As you could see, the method idy, returns the hash representation of your ID:

Article.new(id: 1).idy
# My

If you want get all idys from a collection, just map it:

Article.create
Article.create

Article.select(:id).map(&:idy)
# ["My", "aL"]

Find

Since you add the idy callback to your model, find method will be decorated:

Article.find('My').id
# 1

Keep in mind that if you have some internal code, that you cannot change, using find, the hash version of the id, idy, will be mandatory to correct find the record.

Findy and Findy!

We encourage you to use this methods and avoid tweak find Rails method. As you expect, it will find directly via idy, so a normal integer will be not found, even if it exists on database.

Findy

The bumpless version returns nil when record is not found.

Article.findy('My').id
# 1

Article.findy 'missing'
# nil

Findy!

The bump ! version raises an error when record is not found.

Article.findy!('My').id
# 1

Article.findy! 'missing'
# ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound: Couldn't find Article with 'idy'="missing"

Functions

You can encode a number manually:

Model.idy_encode(idy)

You can decode an idy in case you want to use the ActiveRecord methods with the original ID:

Model.idy_decode(idy)

Testing

Check if your model responds to idy method:

RSpec

it { is_expected.to respond_to(:idy) }

Inspiration

It was inspired and improved from:

• obfuscate_id
• hashids_uri