To use LCG you must possess a personal digital certificate from a Certification Authority (CA) recognised by LCG. The certificate will be needed both during the registration process and also when you submit jobs to the LCG. CAs operate in some of the larger laboratories or are organised to cover national and regional geographical areas. The table below lists all the CAs recognised by LCG. These include CAs from the European Datagrid and Crossgrid projects. You should apply for a certificate from the CA listed in the table which is most appropriate for your location. Individuals without access to a local or national CA in the table below should apply to the CNRS/France CA which can, under some circumstances, issue personal, host and service certificates in such cases.

Important: The private key associated with your certificate should:

• be stored in a file which is only readable by you
• not be stored somewhere visible on the network (e.g. not in an NFS mounted directory)
• be protected by a secure password. Help with choosing a secure password is available here.
• never shared with anybody else.

Failure to observe the above rules could result in you being denied access to LCG.

Some LCG sites issue certificates as part of their site authentication procedure. These are typically valid for only a short time (< 1day) and are tied to authentication to the sites Kerberos security system. If you are based at one of the these institutions, instructions for obtaining and using the certificates are available directly from the links in the table below.

This information is derived from tables published at http://marianne.in2p3.fr/datagrid/ca/ ,http://grid.ifca.unican.es/crossgrid/wp4/ca/ and the LCG document Approval of LCG-1 Certificate Authorities.