959473 - Use 12-character GUIDs for logins, not enormous 38-character strings

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Password Manager, task, P5)

Description

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

This is the Password Manager equivalent of the ancient Places Bug 715355.

I just noticed that we're wastefully using UUIDs for logins. This has a perf impact on the Sync service, makes local databases and wire packets bigger than they need to be, and is generally a Bad Idea. (Especially when we're storing them with redundant "{----}"!)

If we could, I'd love to ditch these on all platforms in Firefox 29. That probably won't happen, but we should still ditch them as soon as we can.

Is there any reason why we're still using UUIDs?

Comment 1

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Hmm. I remember some discussion on this a long time ago (around when some of the other engines switched to a shorter GUID), but I can't find a bug about it. Maybe that happened in email, and the lack of a bug helped this fall through the cracks.

I don't know of any reason to not do this, we don't use the GUIDs in the password manager, so it should be simple to switch over to generating the new-format GUIDs. (OTOH, if you want to change the GUIDs of existing entries, that would be more complex.)

Comment 2

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to Justin Dolske [:Dolske] from comment #1)
> Hmm. I remember some discussion on this a long time ago (around when some of
> the other engines switched to a shorter GUID), but I can't find a bug about
> it. Maybe that happened in email, and the lack of a bug helped this fall
> through the cracks.

Such is engineering, mm?

> I don't know of any reason to not do this, we don't use the GUIDs in the
> password manager, so it should be simple to switch over to generating the
> new-format GUIDs. (OTOH, if you want to change the GUIDs of existing
> entries, that would be more complex.)

Awesome!

We'd want to use these for all records, so a concrete proposal, contingent on this being complete really really soon (prior to storing data in New Sync):

* Add a 12-char GUID column
* Existing records: new Sync will use the 12-char GUID, Old Sync will use UUIDs.
* New records will get only a 12-char GUID, and Old Sync will use that, too.
* When we stop supporting Old Sync, we can drop the old UUID column.

If it doesn't get done in time, we'd still get some benefit (smaller GUIDs), but we wouldn't be able to restrict string sizes on the server, so it's a smaller win.

Thoughts?

Comment 3

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

This will probably only get resolved when we switch to the Rust login storage library.