Background A key consideration in the design was that NIH would be a relying party with respect to the digital credentials used to sign the electronic grant applications. This is important for several reasons. For privacy and resources reasons, NIH would like to avoid issuing digital credentials to individuals and institutions. Experience trying to maintain an up-todate, accurate inventory of research faculty and staff has demonstrated to NIH the futility of a government-centric, centralized approach to issuing and maintaining credentials of faculty engaged in government-sponsored biomedical and biobehavioral research. On the other hand, academic institutions have a much easier time of keeping track of their faculty and graduate students – so long as they wish to continue to receive paychecks. Under mandate to adopt broad electronic business methods by October, 2003, Federal Agencies are working hard to figure out ways to put their business on-line in a way that is secure. A leading contender to make e-government secure is and trustworthy public key cryptography. At the same time, farsighted institutions of higher education have been busy deploying PKIs and issuing digital certificates to their faculties and staffs to enable secure, electronic business with the government and with each other. These institutions wish to use their locally issued digital credentials to do electronic business with the government securely. The NIH, in turn, wishes to be able to rely on business partnerissued digital credentials, thereby avoiding the cost and administrative burden of issuing and managing electronic credentials. NIH and EDUCAUSE jointly constructed a PKI interoperability pilot project that demonstrated the ability of the Federal Government to receive electronic forms signed with digital certificates issued by institutions of higher education. Many academic institutions are in the process of deploying PKIs and issuing digital certificates to faculty, staff and students to facilitate e-business on campus, and these schools have voiced a clear desire to use their locally issued digital credentials for doing business with the Federal government. Thus, the logical design plan was to encourage deployment of institutional PKIs. Description of Project