Subject: Any Organization Certificates out there?

From: "Anders Rundgren" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 23:07:27 +0100

Hi,
My company is spearheading an effort to create an all
PKI-enabled version of the OBI (Open Buying on the Internet)
standard.  A stumbling block is that the core is based on what
we refer to as a "Digital Company Paper", which is an
organization certificate.  Some people consider Web-server
certificates as organization certificates, and that is true to
some extent, but has a major limitation: A domain name may
be owned by one legal entity and used by many associated
legal entities.  And the typical (non-standardized) other
information like O=x and OU=y is essentially useless
as it is not guaranteed to be unique or stable.  L (Locality) is even
worse as companies relocate quite often.  What you need
are certificates that contains a unique ID in a specified
fictitious (CA-specific) or externally administered
naming domain (National, DUNS etc).

Without such certificates, PKI-based B2B-business will be hard
to achieve as RP's sort of have to guess what IBM legal unit is
associated with a "secure.ibm.com" web-server certificate.
Particularly long-term, usage will break every now and
then due to the "imprecise" way, non-DNS information is applied.
And each renewed cerificate or changed web-server name (like
"secure0.ibm.com" to "secure9.ibm.com" replaces "secure.ibm.com")
is also a possible source of RP-troubles.  At least if plug-and-play
is called for, as in OBI Express.

Do anybody know if there are any *real* organization certificates
out there, available on a *global scale*?

Regards
Anders Rundgren
X-OBI
+46 70 - 627 74 37