JGridstart/Certificate Authorities

jGridstart is ultimately deployed by certificate authorities that want to give users an easy way to request their user certificates on their local machine.

This page is very much a work in progress, but should provide an overview. Please contact the author if you want to deploy jGridstart.

jGridstart features

The most important features of jGridstart are:

• Graphical interface for local certificate management, with wizard for requests and renewals.
• Supports all major platforms: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
• Supports installation into many web browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, and more
• Allows import/export from/to PEM and PKCS#12

Requirements for certificate authority

jGridstart is currently optimised for certificate authorities that have a manual step in processing certificate requests. This means that once a request is sent by a user, he has to wait until the certificate authority manually creates his certificate, which can take a couple of days. (Although work is being done to connect to Confusa, an online certificate authority.)

The following is required to use jGridstart:

• Interface for submitting requests and retrieving issued certificates (usually a RESTful HTTP interface)
• List of registration authorities and organisations where the user can go for identity verification
• Website hosting jGridstart and a customized JNLP file.

Also see README for more information.