Experiences using Bridge CAs for Grids

Public-Key Infrastructures (PKIs) are widely used for authentication in Grids, due in large part to the success of the Globus toolkit, despite the challenges and difficulties both for PKI administrators and users. The Bridge Certificate Authority (CA) is a compromise between a strictly hierarchical PKI and a mesh PKI and achieves many of the benefits of the hierarchical PKI and mesh PKI but has been untested for use with Grid software. This paper reports on our use of a Bridge CA with the Globus Toolkit v2 and with WSRF.NET. We find that neither software package immediately supports a Bridge CA, and we propose modifications for each software package. With these modifications in place, we believe that Bridges can become an important approach for Grid authentication.