Universally Unique Identifiers: How To Ensure Uniqueness While Protecting The Issuer's Privacy

Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs) - standardized in ISO/IEC 9834-8:2005 - are widely used to uniquely identify entities in modern IT-systems. Apart from what promised in the standard, UUIDs are not guaranteed to be unique while preserving the is- suer's privacy. In this paper we introduce a novel con- cept called collision-free number generation that can be used to locally generate UUIDs which are provably glob- ally unique. Moreover, if the presented technique is in- stanced carefully, a poly-bounded adversary is not able to efficiently identify the issuer of a UUID. Our ap- proach is efficient in terms of communication, time and space. As a by-product, it can be applied in other areas where collisions have to be avoided (e.g. key generation, pseudonym systems and interactive proofs).

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