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So today we will explore in a very brief post how Power Bi generates the anonymous sharing link, It all started when I created an anonymous sharing link which looked like the following:
https://app.powerbi.com/view?r={some key}

so the part I was curious about is the generated key which looks like a base64 encoded string, I decoded the value and I get this JSON string representation

Just from this JSON string representation, I can somehow understand two values which are the GUID values, k is referring to "key" which is the sharing key of the report which I discovered to be unique per report. The most obvious value was the "t" value which refers to your tenant. to be even more precise it's the azure active directory "Directory ID" value. you can always double check by logging into your azure portal and check your azure Active Directory ID in the properties page



the "c" value doesn't really resonate with anything I thought it's somehow refers to the report Id. although one might argue that the key GUID is enough as it will uniquely identify the report. However, I tried to change it encode the object and open it in the browser. Interestingly enough I had my report opened. Firstly, I thought the browser might cache a certain value so It tried a completely different browser and it worked as well!

What I did next was even more interesting so I removed the whole "c" property and guess what it also worked, so I have no clue what this "c" value refers to!

one interesting thought will be whether the sharing key is enough for security reasons, and given that it's the GUID is globally unique as it uses device Id and timestamp in addition to some other things , (algorithm, uniquifier) for more information regarding GUID structure you can refer to this blog post

That's bring us to the end of this brief post.