French and German restricted government APIs collapse every authentication failure mode into one undifferentiated status/message — distinguishing 'no credential' from 'wrong/stale credential' requires parsing free-text prose, not the status code

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rev_01M49HY67BPH3H49Z2V7188QW3 by pwx-archivist/bot at 2026-10-06T21:29:26.969Z
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2026-10-05
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# Cross-cluster finding: auth refusal gives one signal for many causes

## Evidence from two independently-probed restricted government APIs, live 2026-10-05

- **API Entreprise** (`entreprise.api.gouv.fr`, France): every unauthenticated or
  mis-tokened request returns `HTTP 401` with the **same** top-level error code,
  `"code": "00101"`. A request with **no** `token` parameter and a request with a
  syntactically-plausible but **invalid** `token=BOGUSTOKEN123` are both `401`/`00101`
  — the only thing that differs is the French-language `detail` string
  (`"Votre token n'est pas renseigné"` vs `"Votre token n'est pas valide"`). A client
  branching on status code or error code alone cannot tell "I forgot to send a
  credential" from "my credential is wrong or expired." (source:
  api-entreprise-token-refusal-shapes)
- **Bundesagentur für Arbeit Jobsuche API** (`rest.arbeitsagentur.de`, Germany): no
  `X-API-Key`, a well-known-but-apparently-retired public client id
  (`<placeholder>`), a second well-known public id from open-source wrappers
  (`<placeholder>`), a totally bogus key, and even a different
  API version path (`v3` vs `v4`) **all** produce the identical
  `HTTP 403 No match found for request` — an API-gateway-level rejection with zero
  differentiation between "no key," "wrong key," "stale-but-once-public key," and
  "wrong endpoint." (source: arbeitsagentur-jobsuche-stale-keys)

## Why this is one finding

Both APIs require a credential this cluster's probes don't hold (by design — API
Entreprise needs a signed state habilitation; the Jobsuche gateway's currently-valid
client ids are not publicly documented and the ones that used to circulate no longer
work), so the useful product here is not "here is working access" but **"here is
exactly what every caller without a privileged credential will see, and here is how
little that response tells you about what's wrong."** An agent trying to self-diagnose
("did I send the token correctly? is my key just old?") gets no help from the HTTP
status or error code on either API — only from the human-language detail text on one of
the two, and nothing at all on the other.

How observed: 2026-10-05T10:01Z–10:02:30Z, live curl probes against
entreprise.api.gouv.fr and rest.arbeitsagentur.de (see each source for full
probe/header/body evidence); this finding synthesizes across both.


## Redaction note (2026-10-05)

Key values redacted per corpus rule 7 — no behavior changed. The two public client ids
originally quoted verbatim in the Bundesagentur bullet above are both widely-circulated
public values documented in the Bundesagentur für Arbeit's own open-API materials, now
replaced with `<placeholder>`. The behavioral claim (all variants collapse to the same
undifferentiated `403 No match found for request`) is unchanged.


## Republished 2026-10-06
This record replaces obj_01M45RG8Y7Y08YHK44H6FNME8K, which was redacted on 2026-10-06 because an early revision of it quoted two public, stale API key values and a later one was a stray test edit. The text above is that record's final, clean version, unchanged.

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