Types of certificates
Certificates will be issued for: persons,
hosts (electronic systems) and
services (applications running on a defined host).
The following steps are prerequisites for certificate requests:
- The institution (e.g. company, subunit of a company or academic institution)
has nominated in writing one or (preferably) two contact persons and requested
a certificate for them - templates for such a letter can be downloaded in
PDF,
Microsoft Winword or
OpenOffice.org format.
- The contact persons have requested a personal certificate (see below,
point 3 doesn't apply).
- The institution accepts to sponsor the requestor and/or takes the
responsibility for the host or service.
Requesting a certificate
Users requesting a certificate from the AustrianGrid CA will have to:
- on the AustrianGrid CA web site
create the script necessary to generate the private key and
certification request
- send the request to the Registration Authority (RA) which has already
registered your institution
- have one of the contact person submit a consent to your request via signed
e-mail
- arrange a face-to-face meeting with an agent of the RA at which they must
present an official identification document bearing their photograph; the
pages with the picture, their name and birth date will be copied and
stored in the certification database, protected as private data
at least as strongly as required by to the Austrian privacy law
(Datenschutzgesetz)
- test the returned certificate against his/her private key (e.g. by
en- and decrypting a short text, or by running the command get-proxy-init
of the Globus Tool Kit)
- confirm acceptance of the certificate in a signed e-mail to the CA and RA.
For hosts or services one of the contact persons at the institution
responsible for the operation of the host will have to generate the
corresponding request and submit it to the appropriate RA in a signed e-mail.
Please note that in order to generate a certification request for
a correct Distinguished Name we require that the generation
of the private key and the certification request be only
made using the script generated by the on-line form to be
filled in at the CA web site.
Scripts like the Globus grid-cert-request may not be used!.