The Server Certificate Service (SCS) aims to provide low-cost ‘pop-up free’ server certificates for the National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and their constituency.

The ‘pop-up’ problem (which results in a message saying “the issuer of this certificate is not trusted”) occurs when the server certificates are issued by a CA whose root is not listed among those recognised as a trusted one by popular web browsers such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox.

On January 2006, TERENA on behalf of the NRENs involved in the project and after a tender process contracted GlobalSign as CA provider to issue server certificates.