CERN (and other research facilities) use these a lot, to manage access to their internal websites and to the grid (the distributed computing platform). IIRC, yo

CERN (and other research facilities) use these a lot, to manage access to their internal websites and to the grid (the distributed computing platform). IIRC, you have a cern account, and generate a short-term certificate with which you work. You can use it to submit jobs into the grid, but you can also import it into the browser to access e.g. grid monitoring software, or internal wikis. The idea is that in the worst case that you lose the certificate to a hacker, it can be revoked quickly without having to block your whole account. The last time I checked (haven't worked with CERN's computers or the grid for a while), it was pretty user-unfriendly. Obscure shell scripts for everything. It hopefully improved since then. OTOH, it's probably good enough for programmers and researchers.