Integer ID obfuscation techniques

Question

I'm looking for an easy and reversible method of obfuscating integer IDs. Ideally, I'd want the resulting obfuscation to be at most eight characters in length and non-sequential, meaning that the obfuscation of "1" should look nothing like the obfuscation for "2" and so on.

This isn't meant to be secure by any means, so this isn't a huge concern. Additionally, the integers I'll be obfuscating aren't large - between one and 10,000 - but I don't want any collisions, either.

Does anybody have any ideas for something that would fit this criteria?

Answer 1

If you've only got about 10,000 integers then the easiest and most reliably way would probably be a mapping table between the integer and a randomly generated string. Either generate a bunch of random identifiers up-front that correspond to each integer, or just fill them in on demand.

This way you can guarantee no collisions, and don't have to worry about encryption because there's nothing to decrypt as the strings are not derived from the integers themselves.

You could implement it in a database table or in memory (e.g. a two-way dictionary) depending on your needs.