Groth sees CAcert's role as a provider of educational material and an identification system that isn't directly apart of any technology.

Since its inception three years ago, CAcert has been "much more successful than I would have ever imagined", according to Groth, and is used for securing Web sites, and e-mail connections, and does not limit the strength of the certificates.

What began as a side project to authenticate to the NodeDB.com wireless community portal, CAcert now has over 70,000 verified users, is securing over 92,000 e-mails, and has issued over 160,000 certificates.

The system is based on OpenSSL, PHP, C, and MySQL, and claims to go further than what is used by some commercial CAs to prove a person's identity.

CAcert's next big hurdle is gaining inclusion into mainstream Web browsers. Three years ago it was announced CAcert would be included in Mozilla (originator of Firefox) and the team thought it had made it, only to have things dashed less then a week later because Mozilla developers felt their existing inclusion policy "wasn't good enough".