MCWG

The Meta-Certificate Working Group (MCWG), also called the "Meta-Certificate Group (MCG)", was an Internet work group on information security.

The MCWG was founded by [http://gerck.com Ed Gerck] in 1997 and had participants from 26 countries. The discussions were public as in a listserver but with a privacy innovation -- the participants' names and email addresses were anonymized. This privacy feature, which any participant could break voluntarily by simply disclosing name and email address in the list, allowed the discussion to proceed on a technical level more easily, with less ad hominem attacks. This also allowed unwitting competitors to collaborate, creating an open climate.

The MCWG started a fresh approach to Internet security that continues to be influential and useful Definition of Trust in terms of Information Theory: "Trust Points" by Ed Gerck, in Digital Certificates: Applied Internet Security by J. Feghhi, J. Feghhi and P. Williams, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-20-130980-7, 1998.] , Overview of Certification Systems: x.509, CA, PGP and SKIP, in The Black Hat Briefings '99, http://www.securitytechnet.com/resource/rsc-center/presentation/black/vegas99/certover.pdf and http://mcwg.org/mcg-mirror/cert.htm] . The work developed by the MCWG has been applied to Internet standards and practical developments in several work groups and companies worldwide.

The current [http://mcwg.org MCWG] website is a "Read-Only Internet Landmark" that preserves the content that was created from 1997 to 2000. Some links are not operational, including the listservers.

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