Do Digital Certificates Hold the Key to Colleges On-Line Activities?
By FLORENCE OLSEN Cambridge, Mass. Facing a growing need to verify the identities of students and employees for on-line transactions, a handful of universities have begun issuing high-tech “digital certificates” that are nearly impossible for hackers to tamper with. Because the portable electronic identifiers are highly efficient at proving to other computers that people are who their computers say they are, officials at some leading research universities say that certificates have dozens, if not hundreds, of potential uses. Administrators hope to rely on the digital certificates as they make more and more of their campus functions “self-service” — for example, letting students register for courses on line. And the certificates may let network administrators determine who gets to take advantage of new high-speed links created by projects like Internet2. A digital certificate is a tiny, coded file with identifying information about an individual or institution. Associated with the cert
