Up to this point, we've reviewed a couple of fundamental security concepts, and all the features of the Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI). So, we should be ready to start churning out secure services, right? Well, we're not quite there yet. Remember that authentication is a very important concern in Grid applications and that, to perform strong authentication, a digital certificate is a must. If you're just starting with Globus and Grid programming, chances are you don't have one. So, before we can start writing secure services, we need to get one!

Don't worry, no purchase necessary. We won't be going to one of those big and expensive Certificate Authority, but instead will be installing a very simple CA developed by the folks a Globus. To be precise, we will be doing the following: