# What does OIW stand for

There seem to be many OID's that have been put in the ASN.1 tree that have the following ISO identified organization: OIW.

One example is SHA-1 (ElGamal seems to be another):

id-SHA1 OBJECT IDENTIFIER ::=
{iso(1) identified-organization(3) oiw(14) secsig(3)
algorithms(2) 26 }


Can anybody explain what this organization entailed? It seems to have been an OSI workshop where NIST participated with other organizations to set up standards. But there is precious little information to find on the internet.

The SHA-1 standard lists it as the "NIST / OSI Implementors' Workshop". But that seems to be little reason for it to specify SHA-1 in itself.

• I hope this is sufficiently on topic. I tried to look up where a particular Algorithm Identifier for ElGamal was defined, but internet searches provided precious little information. – Maarten Bodewes Oct 3 '14 at 16:05
• Open System Implementors Workshop alvestrand.no/objectid/1.3.14.html – Henrick Hellström Oct 3 '14 at 16:17
• books.google.se/… – Henrick Hellström Oct 3 '14 at 16:19
• Thanks Henrick, and I had the enjoyment of upping my Swedish too :) Posted it as an answer if you don't mind. To everybody: anything more definitive as an answer (i.e. what this organization actually comprised of and actually did) would be appreciated. – Maarten Bodewes Oct 4 '14 at 15:26