sufficient obfuscation

[Chase Southard]

Thinking about an event registration rails app 'cause what I have now is no good... Instead of exposing /registrants/1 to the user after they fill out their information, I thought it would be better to obfuscate things a bit and give the person registering a URL they can hold on to.

Does the method below provide sufficiently randomization and robust obfuscation? Or is there something about the String.crypt() and Salt that which makes this a bad idea.

class Registrant < ActiveRecord::Base

before_save :gen_confnumber

private

def gen_confnumber
     #really a string not a number. confusing.
      self.confnumber = "#{self.firstname}#{self.lastname}".crypt(Time.now.strftime("%W%Y%H%M%S"))
      #where %W =  week of the year; %Y = year (2008); %H = hour, 24-hour clock; %M = minute; %S = second
end

end

Later,

Chase

[Leslie Hensley]

Chase,

I'm using http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/Uses+Guid+Plugin on
http://www.showerinabox.com and it works like a charm. I don't create
accounts for customers I just email them the URL with a guid in it.

Leslie