Mechanisms for increasing the usability of grid security

Grid security is based on public key infrastructure (PKI), an architecture that offers strong security for inter-institutional projects, making it ideal for computational grids. However, current PKI implementations suffer from serious usability issues in terms of end-user acquisition and management of credentials, something which grid security inherits from its PKI foundation. In this paper, we describe two parallel efforts to apply the concept of “Plug-and-Play PKI”, designed to improve PKI usability, to improve the usability of grid security.