This is a follow-up post to my previous post “Front door locks”.

I’m happy to announce a little utility that exports TCS certificate/keys to the hard disk – more precisely to your “.globus” directory where grid tools expect to find them.

Here follows instructions on how to use it:

First, you of course need to have some TCS credentials in your browser. If necessary, login on

tcs-escience-portal.terena.org/

with your intranet credentials, click on “new certificate” and “install to keystore”. Now you have a fully functional grid certificate in your browser. Now we come to the point of this post: To also have fully functional grid credentials on your hard disk, in the form of the two files “~/usercert.pem” and “~/userkey.pem” all you have to do is click

portal.grid.dk/BrowserCertKey/launch.html

and click OK a few times. Notice that by doing so, you’re giving my app access to your hard disk and keystore (key chain), so if you don’t trust me or my app, you obviously shouldn’t run it.

Caveats:

- The app is a prototype: a quick mockup – and it is about 10 times as large as it could be. We’ll trim it down in size eventually.
- The app is self-signed – that is, not as secure as it could be: If my web server were compromised, someone could replace the app with their own malicious and self-signed app. We’re working on getting the app signed by a trusted certificate.
- The following platforms/browsers are supported: Mac/all, Windows/Firefox, Linux/Firefox