The aim of this project is to develop and ultimately implement a PKI for CAUDIT universities (which include universities in Australia,New Zealand, Fiji and Papua New Guinea) and the CAUDIT research community. To achieve this goal the project team is working closely with other projects such as Meta Access Management System Project (MAMS) and Middleware Action Plan and Strategy (MAPS). A phased approach is being used in order to test interoperability and find out issues regarding PKI enabled applications prior to production implementation.Ithas four central objectives as detailed below:

• Putting PKI into Production  - A project to build upon the existing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) standards project and move PKI into production for the Higher Education and Research Sector. While the CAUDIT PKI project was making significant progress in this field, its funding was only to develop standards and some trial implementations.
  


• Establishing PKI/Shibboleth alignment A project to build upon the existing PKI and MAMS projects and the Production PKI project identified earlier to develop models and pilot implementations of a common trust federation which would support both PKI and Shibboleth and therefore support a common approach to authentication and authorisation across the sector. This includes the development of a unified model for federation and trust which aligns PKI and Shibboleth approaches, including pilot demonstrations. This unified model, once complete, could form the basis for a future production Federation service across the Higher Education and Research Sector, aligned with the production PKI service outlined above.


• Reducing the Systems Cost barriers to entry for PKI - This project aims to reduce the barriers for entry to PKI for all universities and research institutions by providing cost effective access to a free or low cost Certificate Management System for the sector (including access to the source code). This will require the development of training, documentation and a support mechanism.


• Integrating Grid technologies with PKI/Shibboleth - This project will investigate the requirements and develop appropriate technologies to allow the APAC Grid infrastructure to become properly Shibboleth aware. It will provide opportunities for research activities in high-performance computing and large-scale data initiatives to test the functionality and scalability of the Shibboleth authentication architecture and associated authorisation architectures being developed by groups such as PERMIS. It will work directly with the NMI "Grid-Shib" initiative as appropriate.