A crypto library aimed at auditability

Posted Jan 20, 2014 16:08 UTC (Mon) by ThomasBellman (guest, #67902)
In reply to: A crypto library aimed at auditability by Cyberax
Parent article: A crypto library aimed at auditability

> And it's not a coincidence that certificate-based authorization
> is used only in cases where major user inconvenience is not a
> problem, like banking websites. The only another case where I've
> seen it used is on StartSSL's site.

Client certificates are used extensively in the grid computing community (Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, European Grid Infrastructure, and so on). Not just for submitting jobs, but also for authenticating to various web sites, like wikis, ticketing systems, monitoring systems, and so on. And many institutions that only work in the grid a little bit on the side (like where I work, with only 3 out of 30 people do grid stuff), use client certificate authentication for almost all our non-grid websites as well.

It is somewhat painful to get your client certificate and install it in your browser, in particular for people who are not computer experts, but once you have it, it is definitely very *convenient* to be automatically logged in to lots of sites without having to look up a username and password for each site.