I second Charles here. These is a definite need for a method for users to get bootstrapped with X.509 certificates without the whole overhead of a PKI.

We are probably to the point where a MyProxy on-line CA could do this better than SimpleCA (IMHO), but there is some documentation required.

Von

Charles Bacon wrote:
On Jul 23, 2008, at 8:37 AM, Alan Sill wrote:

These observations are correct. For any extended (i.e., non-test) grid with any intention to operate in a CA an accredited manner, however, the use of SimpleCA would not be recommended in any case.

Personally, I wish the Globus team would de-emphasize its inclusion of SimpleCA and decouple it from the Globus documentation.

If you can recommend an alternative that would get new users up and running in a demo environment, I would love to hear about it. The problem, to me, looks like a trade-off between users being turned off because they cannot get the software up and running to play with it and the problems users face when deciding to stop using simpleCA and use a real CA. I would much rather get people up and running as quickly as possible than have them decide not to try it at all because they do not know how to pick a CA to use or similar problems.

If you look outside of the quickstart, I don't think we mention SimpleCA very much at all.


Charles

Alan

On Jul 22, 2008, at 3:53 PM, Joel Schneider wrote:

The following documents contain additional information relevant to this
topic:

http://www.ogf.org/documents/GFD.125.pdf
http://www.eurogrid.org/ca/eurogrid-ca-policy.pdf

The EUROGRID document describes steps taken in November 2002 to
discontinue usage of the "nsCertType" extension, and the OGF document
specifies a policy that hash algorithms with known weaknesses, such as
MD5, must not be used in new certificates.

Alan Sill, Ph.D
TIGRE Senior Scientist, High Performance Computing Center
Adjunct Professor of Physics
TTU

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