http://www.mcg.org.br/eg.htm Edgardo Gerck, Dr. rer.nat., M. Sc., Electronic Engineer. Ed Gerck has been at the forefront of developments in Internet security, with five recent patents filed on Internet voting. He received his doctorate in physics (Dr.rer.nat.) from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet and the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Quantenoptik in Munich, Germany, in 1983, with maximum thesis grade (“sehr gut”). He has worked in cryptography since 1987. Dr. Gerck is the founder of the Meta-Certificate Group (MCG), chief executive officer and vice-president of technology of Safevote, Inc., and chairman of the board of the Internet Voting Technology Alliance (IVTA) of Washington, D.C. Ed Gerck was appointed in 1999 to the NSI's RAB -- Registry Advisory Board of Network Solutions, Inc., Herndon, VA, US, and currently serves in advisory capacities with several companies. He has also developed methods for traceless laser erasing of conventional signatures on paper and other media as a proof of lack of security for conventional signatures, as well as methods for tamperproof laser signature of documents and parts, with key-, date-and context-dependent signatures. Documents with more than 400 pages have been laser signed, all pages at once. He has developed a new laser stereolithographic thermal technique to build accurate 3D models, a new low-cost tactile display for the vision-impaired, a new air-gap monitoring device for large electric rotating machines (patented, 50% with ASEA BROWN BOVERI), a new method of high-precision laser cutting with position feedback called geometric superpulse, new software and methods to create large (30 meters) and precise (1 mm) 3D structures by laser lamination, a new method to measure profile depth by laser photo-thermolectric effect, and other developments in the area of material processing, lasers and precise control software. His frequent cooperation work at various Internet fora, such as e-carm, ssl-talk, ssl, cert-talk, dig-sig, sci.crypt, itanet, SEIS, ssl-users, dig-cert, mcg-talk, trust-ref, seguranca, etc. has resulted in leading Internet discussions on issues of security and privacy in networks of networks. He has done and coordinated the development of software since 1972, in languages such as FORTRAN, ALGOL, BASIC, x86/x87 Assembler, Pascal, C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP and others, for DOS, Windows and Unix platforms. He has authored more than one hundred technical papers, published in international journals, seminar proceedings, research reports and patents. He has also published hundreds of Internet reports, papers, expositions and drafts, favoring the Internet as a research tool. One of his Internet papers, "Overview of Certification Systems: X.509,CA, PGP and SKIP" [http://www.thebell.net/papers/certover.pdf] was downloaded more than 65,000 times in its first year and is a standard Internet reference on these subjects. His paper "Toward Real-World Models of Trust: Reliance on Received Information" [http://www.mcg.org.br/trustdef.htm] has been cited in books, thesis and is a standard reference on the subject of trust -- from security systems and communication processes to social relationships. Dr. Gerck's most recent papers on security are available at the MCG site, at [http://www.mcg.org.br/papers.htm] and also at The Bell [http://www.thebell.net], a newsletter on privacy and security technology in Internet voting. His current work is centered on the frontier aspects of cryptography, information security and information theory for networks of networks or internets. In particular, he frequently makes the point that: (i) not only the Internet itself but also traditional commerce, e-commerce, management structures, etc. can all be recognized as internets and, (ii) their use can be bridged by a common approach, which is an abstract model for internet communication systems. "Coherence" emerges as the basic property of such systems and leads to real-world based but formal concepts of trust, information, meaning, identification, authentication, non-repudiation, privacy, security, etc. – which are used to define a communication theory for internets, valid for any networks of networks. In his "bottom-up" approach, security is not an added-on property to information but itself part of the communication model for internets. This goes beyond the current technology used in X.509, PKIX, S/MIME, SSL and PGP to provide information security to networks, which is based on the use of authorization lists, encryption and digital signatures. In fact, Dr. Gerck believes that mistaking the Internet for a network is a basic security flaw in such protocols but one which is unseen today – though its effects pervade the Internet. Dr. Gerck’s work in information security gained worldwide momentum in 1997 when he began to use the Internet to publicly discuss his "bottom-up" approach to the entire subject of PKI and Internet security, already including some prototypes and software interfaces in Java, C and C++ which were developed and tested in the years before. His current work topics include Internet voting protocols, non self-referential identification, subjective and intersubjective logic, law and ethics in relationship to security and privacy in intersubjective logic, quantum cryptography, extrinsic and intrinsic certification, biometrics, smart-cards, X.509, PKIX, PGP, SSL, SET, DNS naming issues and methods, meta-certificates, Java and PHP as model languages, and the application of lasers to provide or break security features. His work is providing a mathematical representation for meaning (an ad hoc assumption in Semiotics and a missing variable in Shannon’s Information Theory) and advancing new cryptographic systems that can use unknown-keys, not only public/private- or secret-keys. One of the practical consequences (exemplifed by protocls called M-DES, Less-DES and DVC) of the new cryptographic systems is that decryption by a brute-force attacker can be penalized with a much higher workload (e.g., 16,000x) than without it, for a given secret-key length – affording safer use for smaller secret-keys. This development is significant for wireless and smart-card applications, in addition to providing for reduced workload at client machines. Dr. Gerck can be reached by e-mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED] The current PGP key is available upin request. This resume is available at [http://www.mcg.org.br/authors/eg.htm].
