The case for using Bridge Certificate Authorities for Grid computing

Marty Humphrey, Jim Basney, Jim Jokl

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

As Grid deployments increase, the challenge remains to create a scalable, multi-organizational authentication infrastructure. Public key infrastructures (PKIs) are widely used for authentication in Grids, due in large part to the success of the Globus toolkit, despite the challenges and difficulties both for PKI administrators and users. The Bridge Certificate Authority (CA) is a compromise between a strictly hierarchical PKI and a mesh PKI and achieves many of the benefits of the hierarchical PKI and mesh PKI but has been untested for use with Grid software. This paper reports on the use of a Bridge CA with two representative Grid software packages: the Globus Toolkit v2 and WSRF.NET. We find that both packages support Bridge CAs sufficiently today to be usable in Grid software architectures, although not without limitations. In this paper, and through these experiments, we build the case for using Bridge CAs for Grid computing.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)817-826
Number of pages10
JournalSoftware - Practice and Experience
Volume35
Issue number9
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 25 2005

Keywords

  • Authentication
  • Bridge Certificate Authority
  • Grid computing
  • PKI

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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