Today in “running a certificate authority is hard”: German company numbers aren’t unique (they’re unique per state; you need to qualify them with which federal state the company is registered within)
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Today in “running a certificate authority is hard”: German company numbers aren’t unique (they’re unique per state; you need to qualify them with which federal state the company is registered within)
Excitingly, nobody is quite sure how you’re supposed to represent this in an
organizationIdentifier
attribute.So far we’ve seen:
NTRDE-VR 13378
(wrong, VR 13378 is shared by about 8 organizations)NTRDE-HRB74346
. This one’s in Bundesdruckerei’s D-Trust Root CA. Oops.NTRDE-F1103R.HRB74346 B
Well, with the B on the end (Berlin), this one’s unique. But only Berlin suffix their registration numbers with a B like that; the other states don’t. And why is the F1103R (An X-Justiz ID) in there?
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Maybe everyone should just give up and just use
VATDE
numbers instead; at least VAT registration numbers are unique (Thanks, EU!).If you’re not VAT registered, sucks to be you
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@erincandescent I kind of hate LEIs but it should probably just use LEIs.
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@russss eh, I feel like an additional identifier you’ve gotta go and register for and renew kinda sucks as a system tbh.
Also they encode the issuer in them, so if you change LEI issuer does your LEI change?
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@russss Honestly a simple and pragmatic approach would just be to extend VAT number assignment to all companies even if they’re not registered for VAT.
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Did you know that company number
HRB 1000
exists thrice within the state of North-Rhine Westphalia alone? -
@erincandescent @russss no, they do not
I moved mine from the GS1 to Bloomberg last year
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@russss Aren't LEIs just for certain financial orgs? So I suppose <10% of German *companies* have one. Might be a good unique identifier but basically non-existant. @erincandescent
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@wink @erincandescent any org can apply for one. At least in the UK, a company needs one to purchase publicly-traded shares, so they're not too uncommon.
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@russss Not an expert but I do think in Germany (which was the original example) it's absolutely not in widespread use, esp. if you don't need it (which would be only if you are a financial org or do stock etc trades/buys AND according to wikipedia also depending on your form of incorporation) and it comes with costs. I'd love to get numbers, but I don't think my 10% estimate is far off. @erincandescent
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@erincandescent @russss @wink having looked up a few businesses' EUIDs , it seems those unique IDs are just X-Justiz IDs.
At least all EUIDs i saw had the form "DE" followed by the X-Justiz ID of the court, followed by a dot and then the HRB.
e.g.: "DEF1103R.HRB74346B" for D-Trust GmBH
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@divayth_fyr @russss @wink Wait its the X-Justiz ID of the court? That actually makes sense
D-Trust might be on to something here!