Kenya Education Network's Certification Authority, the KENET CA got officially accredited as an on-line Classic CA. KENET CA is the first to receive the accreditation in sub-Saharan Africa! The accreditation was bestowed on us by the EUGridPMA (https://www.eugridpma.org) which is the international organisation to coordinate the trust fabric for e-Infrastructure for research in Europe, the Middle-East, and Africa during their January 2016 meeting held in Bratislava, Slovakia. This is a big milestone for KENET and is a reflection of how KENET as a Research and Education Network has grown since its founding in 1999.
The development of the KENET CA started in early 2013 with the support of EI4Africa (an EU-Africa co-operation on E-Infrastructures) and it has gone through a number of technical iterations so as to fit to the policy guidelines laid out by the EUGridPMA.
The accreditation now means that KENET CA will issue researchers with personally identifying digital certificates which they will use to access computing infrastructures deployed globally.
The deployment of High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure is expensive and therefore a long shot for most African countries in the sub-Sahara region. The need among the research community in Kenya for HPC is low but growing. Setting up the Certification Authorities like the KENET CA gives researchers access to the HPC already deployed globally. Researchers will additionally also be able to collaborate, share research data and findings with colleagues belonging to a Virtual Organization (VO) dealing with a particular area of research like Biology, Nuclear Physics, Agriculture etc.
The KENET CA operates a public repository which is available at https://ca.kenet.or.ke and contains the policy governing operations of the KENET CA. Issuance of certificates is through face-to-face meeting with the applicant/subcsriber. The meeting is simply to verify the identity of the researcher, his/her institution and to issue him/her with a token that will be used to generate the certificate.
For any further enquiries about the KENET CA, you can write to us at ca at kenet dot or dot ke. KENET will be rolling out the service soon and assist researchers with on-boarding.