LDAPWiki: Universally Unique Identifier

Overview[1]#

A Universally Unique Identifier or (UUID) is an Unique Identifier standard used in software construction and other systems standardized by the Open Software Foundation (OSF) as part of the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) and defined within RFC 4122.

The intent of Universally Unique Identifiers is to enable distributed systems to uniquely identify information or Entities without significant central coordination. In this context the word unique should be taken to mean "practically unique" rather than "guaranteed unique". Since the identifiers have a finite size, it is possible for two differing items to share the same identifier.

The identifier size and generation process need to be selected so as to make this sufficiently improbable in practice. Anyone can create a UUID and use it to identify something with reasonable confidence that the same identifier will never be unintentionally created by anyone to identify something else. Information labeled with UUIDs can therefore be later combined into a single database without needing to resolve identifier (ID) conflicts.

Binary Encoding#

A GUID can be stored as a 16-byte (128-bit) number.

Microsoft format differs from the UUID standard in the byte order of the first 3 fields.

Microsoft defines a format which is split into four fields, defined as follows:

Bits	Bytes	Name	Microsoft Endianness	Endianness RFC 4122
32	4	Data1	Native	Big
16	2	Data2	Native	Big
16	2	Data3	Native	Big
64	8	Data4	Big	Big

This endianness applies only to the way in which a GUID is stored, and not to the way in which it is represented in text. GUIDs and RFC 4122 UUIDs should be identical when displayed textually.

One to three of the most significant bits of the first byte in Data 4 define the type variant of the GUID:[3]

Pattern	Description
0xx	Network Computing System backward compatibility
10x	Standard
110	Microsoft Component Object Model backward compatibility; this includes the GUIDs for important interfaces like IUnknown and IDispatch
111	Reserved for future use

For the "standard" variant, the most significant four bits of Data3 define the version number, and the algorithm used.[3]

Text encoding#

A GUID is most commonly written in text as a sequence of hexadecimal digits separated into five groups, such as:

3F2504E0-4F89-41D3-9A0C-0305E82C3301

This text notation contains the following fields, separated by hyphens:

Hex digits	Description
8	Data1
4	Data2
4	Data3
4	Initial two bytes from Data4
12	Remaining six bytes from Data4

For the first three fields, the most significant digit is on the left. The last two fields are treated as eight separate bytes, each having their most significant digit on the left, and they follow each other from left to right. Note that the digit order of the fourth field may be unexpected, since it is treated differently from the other fields in the structure. Often braces are added to enclose the above format, such as:

{3F2504E0-4F89-41D3-9A0C-0305E82C3301}

This is sometimes known as "registry format".

LDAP Server Implementations using Universally Unique Identifier#

EntryUUID - Uses the RFC 4122 Standard.
GUID - Used by EDirectory
ObjectGUID - Used by Microsoft Active Directory

More Information#

There might be more information for this subject on one of the following:

[#1] - universally unique identifier - based on information obtained 2014-08-07