Re:Torpedo – Share files, passwords, and more with self-dest...
by dbpatterson on Monday May 19, 2014 @05:01PM
(#7769718)
Take a look at the urls and do some calculation on how likely you are to actually get anything. It looks like 14 characters, alphanumeric with uppercase, which is about 10^25. Even if you can try a thousand urls per second, that would take you about 10^16 days to go through them all (that's a long time).
Or, if you want to calculate probabilities, assume that a billion urls are used (this is an astronomic overestimate). That's 10^9 urls. The chance of hitting one of those with a random guess is 0.00000000000014% (if I counted the 0s right). Not very likely.
Now if the url is observed in transit - that's a completely different thing. Just don't think that random guessing is going to reveal this. It's similar to people thinking you can guess your way to product keys for software (hint: you can't).
Or, if you want to calculate probabilities, assume that a billion urls are used (this is an astronomic overestimate). That's 10^9 urls. The chance of hitting one of those with a random guess is 0.00000000000014% (if I counted the 0s right). Not very likely.
Now if the url is observed in transit - that's a completely different thing. Just don't think that random guessing is going to reveal this. It's similar to people thinking you can guess your way to product keys for software (hint: you can't).