Digital signature technology and applications

Digital signatures are comprised of a series of algorithms and mathematical constructs that ensure the authenticity and verifiability of a person signing a specific document. The reliance on digital signatures continues to increase as virtual work teams, the development of automated contract management, compliance, financial reporting and advanced workflows in the fields of financial services continues to grow (Keenan, 2005). The intent of this analysis is to define the properties and usage of digital signatures, evaluate how legal digital signatures are to stand up in court, and explain the security challenges of digital signatures as well.

Properties and Usage of Digital Signatures

The foundational technology elements of digital signatures are predicated on mathematical algorithms used for supporting advanced asymmetric cryptography including the option of repudiation and non-repudiation (Borasky, 1999). These two areas of repudiation and non-repudiation are essential for ensuring the authenticity and veracity of the person(s) signing are in fact who they say they are (Levin, 2007). Additional properties of digital signatures include private key and cryptographic verification using protocols specifically designed for this purpose (Keenan, 2005). The cryptographic algorithms used must be compatible with the key generation, signing and signature verifying algorithms to ensure digital signatures perform as a common foundation for document security and validation. The area of key generation is one that has seen the greatest number of patents as many enterprise software, messaging and platform providers all look to create a proprietary advantage in their software using this technique (Levin, 2007).

These properties taken together can be used to affix and protect all forms of electronic communication including e-mails, digitally-created documents and increasingly, web pages themselves (Levin, 2007). Attaching digital signatures and ensuring their accuracy using key generation and key cryptography techniques relies on a specific series of algorithm responses form the send to also ensure verification and authentication of transactions (Keenan, 2005). A unique key must be created for each transaction using an encrypted algorithm that exactly matches up to the specific keys, creating a verif8ied connection, opening the document up for signature (Borasky, 1999).

State-of-the-art digital signature systems have very advanced authentication systems that include e-mail authentication, access code authentication that checks a person's ability to provide a share secret or passphrase, identification check using advanced authentication techniques, support for federated authentication that supports algorithms for other authentication platforms and two-factor biometric authentication as well (Levin, 2007). These features taken together allow for shared contract management, compliance and financial reporting workflows across a diverse base of organizations.

Digital Signatures' Legal Ability To Stand Up In Court

There continues to be much debate regarding the legality of digital signatures throughout the accounting, finance and compliance-driven industries that are increasingly relying on them for cost and time savings. The need to produce digitally-based contracts, agreements and reporting to better streamline communication and enable greater levels of transaction accuracy is one of the primary considerations in streamlining getting business done today (Levin, 2007). Digital signatures' ability to stand up in court is directly related to the ability to maintain evidence of a particular electronic document signed with verifiable techniques where a unique key was created just for the specific transaction, or applying of the signature itself (Keenan, 2005). Second, there must be evidence that the particular electronic document was signed by only the recipient and created a specific digitally-encrypted transaction that was specific to the unique signature. Third, digital signature systems must provide an audit record of every action taken on the document including the signatures provided over time. These audit records are critically important in defining the direction and scope of litigation for electronic signatures and the documents, agreements and reports they are affixed to (Keenan, 2005).

Security Challenges of Digital Signatures

Of the many security challenges there are in planning, implementing and using digital signatures, the three most challenging to defend against are defined there. First, there is the security challenge of implementing the signature system correctly to ensure hackers cannot impersonate signatures and interrupt systems workflows (Borasky, 1999). Second, the failure to keep complete certification and documentation on-hand specific to unique industry requirements

(Keenan, 2005). Third, digital signature processes are very compute-intensive even when they are optimized for performance (Borasky, 1999). These are the three top areas of security breaches that occur with digital signature systems over time.