Merge pull request #26258 from edx/feanil/land_adr

Add Anonymous ID related ADR.

common/djangoapps/student/docs/decisions/0001-anonymous-user-id-generation.rst

@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
+Anonymous User Id Generation
+--------------
+
+Status
+======
+
+Accepted
+
+Context
+=======
+
+The student app provides a mechanism to generate multiple anonymous ids for a
+student.  The anonymous ID can be independent of all courses or it can be
+course specific.  To generate the anonymous ID, we currently hash the user's
+``id`` with the Django ``SECRET_KEY`` and a course key if provided.  The
+mapping between the anonymous ID and user ``id`` are saved in the
+``AnonymousUserID`` table.
+
+As it stands, if the ``SECRET_KEY`` is rotated students would get new anonymous
+IDs starting immediately after rotation.  This can cause downstream issues
+where the IDs are output from the system.  For example, the IDs are in tracking
+data and could be used to track a user's activity through a course for research
+purposes.
+
+Decisions
+=========
+
+Once an anonymous ID is generated for a user in a particular LearningContext
+(either a course or some other unit of learning), it will remain that way even
+if the secret used to generate the ID changes.  For any context where an
+anonymous ID does not already exist, a new ID will be generated using the
+latest ``SECRET_KEY``.
+
+
+Consequences
+============
+
+By keeping old IDs static, we increase the risk that if the salting
+data(``SECRET_KEY``) is leaked, then it can be used to determine and correlate
+all anonymous IDs associated with a particular user across all courses. We
+believe that this is a worth while risk to not break downstream services that
+are using anonymous IDs during the lifetime of a course.
+
+Rejected Alternatives
+=====================
+
+Make Anonymous IDs Randomly Generated
+-------------------------------------
+
+The function that generates anonymous IDs, has the option to not persist the
+newly generated ID. In this case, it would give a new anonymous key each time
+the function was called, instead of being consistent other than at key
+rotation. The downstream consequence of changing the SECRET_KEY that often are
+unclear so we opt not to do so at this time. In the future if we can ensure
+that the newly generated IDs are always persisted, we could more safely use
+random generation.