I want to generate unique and random numbers or IDs which I can use them for email verification, account reset, member invitation purposes, etc
for instance,
http://mywebsite.com/member/9a5af103cd540aa
http://mywebsite.com/invite/regitration/eef0dd2e0199640
http://mywebsite.com/reset/account/eef0dd2e0199640
Here I the code I plan to use, do you think it is safe and 'bullet proof'?
$rand = substr(hash('sha512',uniqid(rand(), true)), 0, 15);
echo $rand;
Or any better options?
Thanks.
EDIT:
I have looked into a couple of options after getting the suggestions from here:
com_create_guid
function create_guid()
{
if (function_exists('com_create_guid') === true)
{
return trim(com_create_guid(), '{}');
}
# fallback to mt_rand if php < 5 or no com_create_guid available
return sprintf('%04X%04X-%04X-%04X-%04X-%04X%04X%04X', mt_rand(0, 65535), mt_rand(0, 65535), mt_rand(0, 65535), mt_rand(16384, 20479), mt_rand(32768, 49151), mt_rand(0, 65535), mt_rand(0, 65535), mt_rand(0, 65535));
//return substr(hash('sha512',uniqid(rand(), true)), 0, 15);
}
openssl_random_pseudo_bytes
function generate_password($length = 24) {
if(function_exists('openssl_random_pseudo_bytes')) {
$password = base64_encode(openssl_random_pseudo_bytes($length, $strong));
if($strong == TRUE)
return substr($password, 0, $length); //base64 is about 33% longer, so we need to truncate the result
}
# fallback to mt_rand if php < 5.3 or no openssl available
$characters = '0123456789';
$characters .= 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz/+';
$charactersLength = strlen($characters)-1;
$password = '';
# select some random characters
for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++) {
$password .= $characters[mt_rand(0, $charactersLength)];
}
return $password;
}
I found these two functions from php.net.
But my main concern is - are the numbers/ IDs generated by these two functions unique?
mt_rand
- this generate randomness but not uniqueness as far as I understand - am I right?