TIES II

JISC has an interest in bringing Grid technologies to significantly larger communities of users, and wishes to explore the options for issuing certificates on a much larger scale than at present.

TIES II has undertaken a comparative study of some of the likely practical options for implementing a longer-term production Certification Authority (CA) service for the academic/research community, looking at robustness, scalability, manageability and total cost of ownership. The distinct options which the study covers are as follows:

• Large-scale CA operated within the community: open source CA software;
• Large-scale CA as above: industrial-strength software from a commercial vendor;
• Fully outsourced managed Public Key Infrastructure service from a commercial service operator.

In all cases, institutions fulfil the Registration Authority role for their members and supply the requisite data to the CA service.

The project report is intended to provide an organisational and technical analysis of the problem to assist the JISC in making strategic and possible procurement decisions for a national X.509 certificate infrastructure.

TIES II has built on the work of the TIES I project, also undertaken by EDINA.

The TIES II Final Report (pdf file: 272kb)