To use WLCG you must possess a personal digital certificate from a Certification Authority (CA) recognised by WLCG. The certificate will be needed both during the registration process and also when you submit jobs to the grid.

WLCG accepts certificates issued by CAs who are accredited by the IGTF: Interoperable Global Trust Federation.

Certification Authorities (CA) recognised by WLCG

• Most people should be able to get a certificate from their national CA. See this list to locate your national CA fromthe Interoperable Global Trust Federation.
   
• CERN staff and users (e.g. members of LHC experiments) should be able to obtain a CERN user certificate - see here if you are eligible. If you are, then you can request a certificate.
   
• If none of the CAs above are able to issue you a certificate:
  • Please consult this page for other possibilities.
  • Please contact project-lcg-certificates at cern dot ch for advice in such cases.

Loading Certificates

See https://www.racf.bnl.gov/docs/howto/grid/pemtopkcs12  for converting and importing certificates on various browsers and their versions.

Important: The private key associated with your certificate should:

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

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