Electronic signature, digital signature or qualified certificate, in the language of IT professionals. These are all synonyms that mean the same thing. Do you know how an electronic signature works in practice?
In the previous part of our series, we explained what an electronic signature is and where you can use it. Now it's time to focus on how it works and examples of individual variants.
Hash will allow for precise identification of the document
The credibility of a valid electronic signature is ensured by the transfer of trust from a trusted third party , where verification works by combining the data of the public part and the private part of the certificate through qualified certification authorities.
The principle of trust transfer is based on the method of asymmetric cryptography. It is similar to the principle when in ancient legends heroes carried two parts of a broken seal and only by their unique connection could a document be sealed.
However, don't think of an electronic signature as a picture of your autograph that you put on an invoice. It's not a scanned image, but a mathematical calculation. When creating it, a fingerprint of the document, called a hash, is first calculated. This is a small number of several hundred bits.
The properties of a hash include that if you modify the input document even slightly, the resulting hash will change significantly. In addition, it is mathematically unlikely that two messages will have the same hash, so you can easily identify a single document by it. Once the hash is created, the system encrypts it with the author's private key, creating an electronic signature.
A signature is not the same as a signature
You may also encounter the terms qualified and recognized electronic signature . A qualified signature, as its name suggests, guarantees that a document was signed by the person to whom the signature belongs. On the contrary, it does not guarantee that the person exists. A person's identity is verified only with a recognized electronic signature.
To ensure that there are no problems when checking documents, the signature must meet certain standards. There are three groups of standards for electronic signatures – rules for electronic signatures in PDF documents, rules for electronic signatures within XML data, and rules for general electronic signatures. Within each group, there is a specific variant for long-term archiving.
In connection with electronic signature, you may also encounter the term electronic signature . But you don't have to be afraid of the new term. It is an electronic signature that can also be used by a legal entity or organization. The credibility of an organization is based on the credibility of its documents. An electronic signature is important for the control mechanisms that are carried out over documents in an organization.
From 1 July 2016, the rules for electronic signatures will be governed by the European Regulation on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market (eIDAS) , which will introduce another new concept, electronic seals . However, it will not replace electronic marks and their role in systems in business practice.
Timestamp?
It may be surprising for many to realize that securing the authenticity of a document using an electronic signature in digital form is practically easier than in paper form. Forgery occurs easily by imitating or damaging the carrier, and yet paper has been functioning this way for centuries. In the case of a digital document, the signature can be applied very easily to a large number of documents and the level of security is much higher, because it is given by a trusted archiving process.
It is precisely for archiving processes that the existence of another security element that belongs to electronic documents is essential, namely the time stamp , which we will focus on next.
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