Numeric Identifier Transmission Algorithm Using Hash Function

Abstract

When developing programs or websites, it is very convenient to use relational databases, which contain powerful and convenient tools that allow to work with data very flexibly and get the necessary information in a matter of milliseconds. A relational database consists of tables and records in these tables, each table must have a primary key, in particular, it can be a number of BIGINT type, which is a unique index of a record in the table, which allows to fetch operation with maximum speed and O (1) complexity. After the operation of writing a row to the table of database, the program receives the row identifier ID in the form of a number, and in the future this ID can be used to obtain this record. In the case of a website, this could be the GET method of the http protocol with the entry ID in the request. But very often it happens that the transmission of an identifier in the clear form is not safe, both for business reasons and for security reasons of access to information. And in this case, it is necessary to create additional functionality for checking access rights and come up with a way to encode data in such a way that it would be impossible to determine the record identifier, and this, in turn, leads to the fact that the program code becomes much more complicated and also increases the amount of data, necessary to ensure the operation of the program. This article presents an algorithm that solves these problems “on the fly” without complicating the application logic and does not require resources to store additional information. Also, this algorithm is very reliable since it is based on the use of hash functions and synthesized as a result of many years of work related to writing complex systems that require an increased level of data security and program performance.