Funet Certificate Service opened

02.02.2010

Funet customers can in future obtain certificates without charge. CSC has opened Funet Certificate Service, which offers at the beginning Server Certificates. The service is included in the Funet membership fee.

The certificates are used in secure network communication to authenticate the the service provider and users of transactions.

Funet Certificates are provided by Comodo CA Limited, one of the largest worldwide Certification Authorities. It offers a variety of digital certificates to research and education institutions served by participating National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) at flat rate.

At first The Funet Certificate Service covers server certificates. In the future four new types of certificates will be available:
   
    * e-Science Server Certificate - for authenticating Grid hosts and services. The aim is for these to be IGTF accredited.
    * Personal Certificate - for identifying individual users and securing e-mail communications.
    * e-Science Personal Certificate - for identifying individual users accessing Grid services. The aim is for these to be IGTF accredited.
    * Code-signing Certificates - for authenticating software distributed over the Internet.

Additional information about the Funet Certificate Service as well as the form to subscribe the service are available in the Funet extranet at:https://info.funet.fi/palvelut/varmenteet/. (User name and password are required to access the pages.)

CSC

CSC - IT center for science, is administered by the Ministry of Education. CSC is a non-profit company providing IT support and resources for academia and research institutes: modeling, computing and information services. CSC provides Finland's widest selection of scientific software and databases and Finland's most powerful supercomputers that researchers can use via the Funet network.