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Even if you're only concerned about making unique identifiers, that don't need to be secret, that merely need to be unique, hiding the UUID generation state is a very good idea if users might have the ability to cause new UUID generators to be created. Otherwise, instead of a 2^(128/2) = 2^64 birthday attack, they can make 2^N generators, find the one that overflows into the next the quickest (i.e. a birthday attack on the 2N msb's), and have 2^(128-2N) work to do. This means you could do a 2^36-sized birthday attack and then have 2^56 work left to do, and that part's not memory-bound. For example, this works if you have generators that seed a 128-bit counter with /dev/urandom, and then increment from there. You can avoid this if you "just" use some CSPRNG.



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