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Comment by ntauthority | Hacker News Reader

My favorite issue with phone number-based identity verification is that it doesn't account for multiple different countries well at all. In some regions, getting more than one 'legit' phone number (i.e. not on any of the VoIP blocklists) per person is nearly impossible, while in other regions, even in the Western world, it's very much possible to buy a lot of pay-as-you-go plans, keep the numbers from expiring, and use them to retain perhaps dozens of accounts at no to minimal cost, making it yet another measure that affects legitimate users disproportionately compared to it affecting illegitimate users.

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I really wish there was something that was easy to get as a company but hard to get as an individual. As a B2B SaaS, I want to do the organization-level equivalent of KYC — "Know Your Corporate Buyer"? — but there's no such thing.

Instead, all anyone offers in this vein are identifiers that are really annoying to get and that nobody already has as a matter-of-course of registering a company; such that many real companies can't (or won't bother to) pass them. DUNS numbers are a common choice. Our company is five years old and doesn't have a DUNS number. It takes two weeks to get one. So how could I expect our customers to bother getting one just to try our product?

"can you set this value in a TXT field on your DNS" or another domain-level challenge-authentication mechanism would be one. Sure, anyone can buy a domain but in theory that is what Extended Verification is supposed to represent, so if you get a valid handshake from an EV domain then in theory you're talking with someone representing the organization that the EV certificate was issued for.

Of course in principle you can get an EV cert for any company as well, but now we're talking about determining whether a company is sufficiently well-known to accept, which is not something that can fully be solved deterministically since that's a human judgement, there will always be some grey areas. But, there are certainly a lot of companies that could probably be "automatically verified" in some fashion (ford motor company? reasonably well-known, and this is their domain...) given some sort of authoritative domain -> stock mapping, and that's not impossible to do if you trust the EV scheme.

Anyway, not perfect, but challenges based raises the bar a lot from "register domain with godaddy and sign up for let's encrypt" to "first you have to get an EV certificate..."

Of course, since such a mechanism is not widely used... not exactly going to find tons of official support for using it like that. But the mechanisms are there!

Isn't a company itself a thing that is easy to get as an individual, in certain jurisdictions?

Yeah, but not usually easy enough that you can make hundreds/thousands of them quickly for a single purpose and then throw them away.

Also, as a slight tweak, I'd hope that this authentication scheme would only admit legal companies that are at least a week old. People who do these sorts of bulk-registration attacks tend not to be patient people, willing to wait around for their credentials to gain reputation before using them. They create them and then try to use them right away. Whereas no real company would be signing up for most B2B services in its first week of legal existence. (Google Workspace? Sure. Accounting software? Probably not.)

Ultimately this depends on what the attack is.

If it's targeted to X company for a specific reason, they'll wait however long they need. If it's generic and X company is just caught in the crossfire, then maybe.

>Whereas no real company would be signing up for most B2B services in its first week of legal existence. (Google Workspace? Sure. Accounting software? Probably not.)

When I've registered companies in the past, it's when I have sales. Before then, it's just an idea to see if we get users. But the company with the service can determine that.

Corporate Number/Tax ID?

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