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The case for using Bridge Certificate Authorities for Grid computing
Author(s) -
Humphrey Marty,
Basney Jim,
Jokl Jim
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.689
Subject(s) - public key infrastructure , computer science , certificate authority , grid computing , grid , bridge (graph theory) , computer security , scalability , authentication (law) , lightweight directory access protocol , usable , certificate , compromise , public key cryptography , software , world wide web , operating system , encryption , medicine , social science , geometry , mathematics , algorithm , sociology , directory
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. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.