Automatic Certificate Based Account Generation and Secure AJAX Calls in a Grid Portal

Virtual organizations are interested in providing secure grid-related services to individual scientist users through portals and invest significant time and effort in managing them. Systems are often in place for users to request and receive grid certificates in many grid infrastructures as a basis for their identity in the grid. These identities are, however, typically disconnected from Web portal accounts and this presents an administrative maintenance problem. Furthermore, integrating certificate identities with grid portal identities is complicated when dynamic AJAX technology is used in the portal to connect to services outside the portal. The User Centric Monitoring project has developed a solution for automatic generation of Web portal accounts that can be synchronized to a pre-existing list of grid certificate identities.