Electronic signatureis executed by a person with the intention to sign and authenticate an online contract or any record. ESignatures are the legal substitute for handwritten signatures. It can also be defined as an electronic sound, symbol, or process, which are attached to or logically associated with a contract or other record and is executed or adopted by the person with the intention to sign the record.
A digital signature is one of the most advanced and secure ways to sign documents online. A digital signal creator provides the highest assurance about each signer’s identity and the authenticity of the documents they sign, so it can be used to satisfy the most demanding legal and regulatory requirements.
Benefits of digital signature
- Higher security.
- Legal compliance and wide acceptance.
- Time savings.
- Workflow automation.
- Cost savings.
- Happier end-users.
- Better company image and CSR.
Uses of digital signatures
Digital signatures meet three crucial information security goals: integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation.
Data integrity: Message or Data integrity is very crucial during data transfers. Data integrity helps ensure that the message received by the recipient is the same message sent by the sender. In wide area networks like the Internet, where messages have to hop from one node or network device to another before arriving at their intended final destination, there can always arise the risk of messages getting altered along the way, whether deliberately or accidentally. Data integrity mechanisms help to mitigate those risks. Through a data integrity check, we’ll get to know if the message we received has been tampered with.
Authentication: Whenever we receive any sensitive file, it’s sometimes not enough to know that the information in that file has been unaltered. We should always be sure whether it came from the person we think sent it. In other words, we would need a mechanism that will enable us to authenticate the source.
Non-repudiation: At last, there might be data exchanges where we wouldn’t want senders to disown transmissions, they sent some time in the past. For example, if someone submits a report and the report is later found fraudulent, we wouldn’t want the sender to deny that he sent it.
How digital signatures work
Cryptographic digital signatures use asymmetric encryption keys, which are the public and their corresponding private or secret keys. The private key is generally used to create a digital signature (in other words, for “signing”), while the public encryption key is used for verifying the digital signature. What makes this work is the fact that a pair of public and private keys are so closely linked with each other that it would be virtually impossible for a public key to authenticate a signature generated by a private key that it isn’t associated with.
Digital or electronic signature help in enforcing security during data transfers. They’re mainly responsible for establishing authentication, data integrity, and non-repudiation. The digital signature verifies it and ensures the following. The document is authentic and comes from a verified source. The document is not manipulated since it was digitally signed. A trusted organization like CA has also verified its identity.
