We have been developing and deploying a certificate-based authentication scheme for the kind of distributed access control needed by collaborations that span organizational boundaries, e.g., Collaboratories and the Grid. I will give an overview of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), X.509 identity certificates and SSL and how they can be used to securely identify users, and create signed certificates. Then I will describe the Akenti authorization server as an example of how to use all this stuff. Somewhere along the line, I will give the pros and cons of PKI verses Kerberos and local account/passwords.

Snacks will be provided.

See Conundrum Talks for more information about this series.