Swedish University PKI – SWUPKI
Ingress
For a basic introduction in Public Key Infrastructures, read the tutorial in the documents section.TERENA Certificate Service
SWUPKI is the public key infrastructure for the Swedish higher education community. It started as cooperation between Umeå Universitet and Stockholms Universitet. Since then many other universities and other organisations in the education community have joined. SWUPKI is now become a service within SWAMI.
The PKI was started because the development of middleware infrastructure created an obvious need to secure and protect the integrity of communication between middleware components and applications. There was the option of using certificates from commercial suppliers. Although these could provide satisfying levels of assurance, the commercial suppliers were not seen to be fully committed to following open standards in their certificates. The prospect of making core middleware communications dependent on proprietary standards was not appealing. Since the costs for starting and maintaining an independent PKI were estimated to not be too overwhelming, SWUPKI was created.
SWUPKI operate under a common policy, a common policy CA and policy management authority. The members run their own subsidiary CAs. By running the CAs under the common organisational framework for SWUPKI, we have an infrastructure for protecting the integrity of transactions between the members. The common PKI also allow us to concentrate knowledge at the root level on the using and development of PKI technology.
SWUPKI has so far only issued server certificates, but we are planning to expand the service to include personal certificates. As networked applications become ever more business critical, we want to strengthen the methods of asserting the identities of users. Therefore we want to start to implement authentication with personal certificates and smart cards within the next couple of years.
NOTE: SWUPKI has expired and has been replaced by
TERENA Certificate Service
.
The PKI for the Swedish higher education community
SWUPKI is the public key infrastructure for the Swedish higher education community. It started as cooperation between Umeå Universitet and Stockholms Universitet. Since then many other universities and other organisations in the education community have joined. SWUPKI is now become a service within SWAMI.
A PKI to stay in control of our infrastructure
The PKI was started because the development of middleware infrastructure created an obvious need to secure and protect the integrity of communication between middleware components and applications. There was the option of using certificates from commercial suppliers. Although these could provide satisfying levels of assurance, the commercial suppliers were not seen to be fully committed to following open standards in their certificates. The prospect of making core middleware communications dependent on proprietary standards was not appealing. Since the costs for starting and maintaining an independent PKI were estimated to not be too overwhelming, SWUPKI was created.
Members run their own CAs under a common policy
SWUPKI operate under a common policy, a common policy CA and policy management authority. The members run their own subsidiary CAs. By running the CAs under the common organisational framework for SWUPKI, we have an infrastructure for protecting the integrity of transactions between the members. The common PKI also allow us to concentrate knowledge at the root level on the using and development of PKI technology.
Personal certificates around the corner
SWUPKI has so far only issued server certificates, but we are planning to expand the service to include personal certificates. As networked applications become ever more business critical, we want to strengthen the methods of asserting the identities of users. Therefore we want to start to implement authentication with personal certificates and smart cards within the next couple of years.
SWUPKI is an official part of the Terena TACAR CA Repository. More information about the PKI including root certificates can be found at www.swupki.se.
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