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Seals Documents
The best digital signature solution seals the document using standard technology.
Your company has chosen an electronic signature solution that ads an image of your graphical signatures to documents; you can now attach a graphic representation of your signature to any document created in Microsoft Word. This is all well and good, until you discover that even though you have apparently signed the document, it can be easily changed by any recipient – while the electronic signature remains intact, just as you appended it. The door to fraud and forgery has been opened wide!
The solution used has simply placed a digitized “picture” of the signature on the document: it doesn’t seal the document, it doesn’t verify the authenticity of the person signing it, nor does it guarantee that the transaction cannot be altered.
In the traditional paper world, transactions are validated by signing them either on an accepted form, such as a check, or in front of a trusted third party, a notary or lawyer, who then “stamps” the signatures so that they could not be changed.
In the virtual paperless world, digital signatures must perform the same function, i.e. guarantee that the signer is legitimate (that signatories are who they claim to be) and that neither the signature nor anything written in the document can be changed without authorization.
A digital signature must be able to seal any electronic document and guarantee that it is tamper-proof. It is a one-time “fingerprint”, unique to both the signer and the document and ensures that the signer is indeed the originator or owner of the document. This “fingerprint” cannot be reused or reassigned and proves that the message has not been altered in any way. Should the document be changed or altered, the digital signature is automatically invalidated, providing total protection against forgery.
Multiple Application Support
The best digital signature solution supports multiple applications.
You are operating an electronic signature solution that enables the signing of documents created with the most commonly used applications – Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat.
But there are some documents produced by your ERP system that also need to be signed and your electronic signature solution does not support this application because the ERP application is not supported by the chosen electronic signature solution.
Traditionally, when signing paper documents, it didn't matter what type of document it was; a form, an invoice or a typed contract. Now you need the same flexibility in a paperless world.
A number of different applications and document management systems are available. It is important to select a digital signature solution that not only supports different applications, such as Word, Excel, Outlook, PDF, TIFF, AutoCAD, InfoPath and other third party applications, you should be able to add an electronic signature to any document type. One way to guarantee support for any file format is provided by solutions that convert any documents from any system into a “signed” PDF file.
Graphical Signatures
The best digital signature solution offers the possibility of "seeing" the signature.
Traditionally, once a document has been signed (with a “wet” signature), the signatures are visible. It is possible to identify who signed the document and the capacity in which it was signed; when renting an apartment, for example, the parties sign a lease. The contract clearly displays the signatures and identifies who is the landlord and who is the tenant. Anyone looking at the document can easily identify the signatories and their roles.
In the virtual paperless world, digital signature solutions offer trust and security but they do not offer easy identification. Visual graphical signatures do not add any security to the document, but they are important from a user’s acceptance point of view, as they provide a natural user indication that the document is indeed signed.
It is therefore important to include both the Digital Signatures, which preserve the Data Integrity of the document and the digital signer’s authenticity and the graphical image of the signer’s handwritten signature, which is a familiar form of identifying the signer.
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