About TIES

JISC circular 06/02 invited proposals for projects which will enable the wider application of emerging security technologies to the JISC Information Environment. The central purpose of project TIES is to implement digital certificate technology for authentication and a number of methods for authorisation, in both an institutional and a JISC Data Service Provider (DSP) context.

In the context of the institution, the TIES project will implement the administrative and technical mechanisms required to deliver digital certificates to the University's members, and will consider the issues of management, scale, and costs other institutions might be expected to encounter in the deployment of a digital certificate infrastructure for their members. TIES will also seek to work with a number of Associate Partner institutions, of different types (HE/FE), geographical spread, and technical resource to test the practicality of deployment across different parts of the HE/FE sector.

On the DSP side, TIES will implement authentication using standard digital certificates, and will implement a variety of schemes for authorisation. TIES will seek to establish links with other projects in the programme to verify that its mechanisms for evaluation of digital certificates are generally effective. The project will also benefit from collaboration with a publisher as an Associate Partner to explore the issues in implementing certificate verification software in a commercial environment.

The project runs for 12 months starting on 1 October 2002.