The USHER Certification Authority (CA), opened for operation in 2006, is a public key infrastructure (PKI) supported by the higher education community. Operated by the USHER Policy Authority and Internet2, USHER supports emerging deployments in research, education, and transactions in higher education that require PKI. USHER supports PKI-enabled applications that require the same general level of identity management security and practices that central campus computing groups already use when they issue email accounts, provide access to individual disk storage and personal calendar, and similar services. USHER extends the intra-campus PKI-Lite model for use with inter-institutional applications.