Dear CAs, Relying Parties, Users, and all others interested,
Today, at the 15th Global Grid Forum in Boston, the International Grid Trust Federation was officially established. With this, the process started almost five years ago has reached a new milestone:
http://www.gridpma.org/docs/igtf-newsrelease-20051005.pdf
The IGTF is a federation of certification authorities or grid policy management authorities (grid PMAs), and the major grid infrastructure projects that together define the policies and standards for grid identity management. Comprising the three regional grid policy management bodies, the EUGridPMA, the Asia Pacific Grid PMA (APGridPMA), and The Americas GridPMA (TAGPMA), the federation today has 61 members and covers 50 countries and regions.
The new federation builds on the foundations laid by the EUGridPMA. The same minimum requirements on classic CAs that have been the basis of the EUGridPMA have been adopted by all IGTF members, so that relying parties can have the same level of trust in the CAs that are accredited by the APGridPMA and the TAGPMA.
The new distribution of trust anchors will reflect this equivalence, by distributing new common metapackages "ca_policy_igtf" that replaces the current EUGridPMA-only bundles. The IGTF meta-packages will contain all CAs accredited under a given profile, regardless of their regional affiliation.
The APGridPMA and TAGPMA, at the same time enriched the federation with new profiles that enable more high-quality identity providers to issue certificates. They will be issuing credentials to users in their own organisation, leveraging strong local methods of authentication, like Kerberos. These "short-lived credential generation services" usually issue (proxy) certificates valid for hours or a few days, thus eliminating the need for long-term key management by the end-user. It is expected that by November this year the PMAs will be able to distribute a bundle of CAs accredited under this new "SLCGS" Authentication Profile.
For the activities of the IGTF, pointers to all authentication profiles, and the IGTF Charter, please go to the web site at:
or look at any of the regional PMA pages for the IGTF information.
A new distribution (0.33) is due by the end of October 2005.
We hope that you find this update useful and welcome any comments you may have. Also, feel free to redistribute this information widely as you see appropriate.
Regards, David Groep
For more information about this newsletter and the mailing list, please refer to the EUGridPMA web site at https://www.eugridpma.org/