What is an Electronic Signature?

A digital signature?is a type of electronic signature that, when applied to a document,?guarantees and validates its authenticity, integrity, reliability, and legal validity. It is the digital equivalent of a hand-written signature or seal, at the same time offering much higher levels of security. The digital signature is aimed at solving the problem of tampering and imitation in digital communications.

Moreover, digital signatures can also provide proof of the origin, identity, and status of electronic documents, transactions, or digital messages.

Very important to know today is that digital signatures are now mandatory for invoices to and from the public administration. In other words, the digital signature becomes an indispensable tool to be able to receive or issue invoices with PAs. On the contrary, digital signatures are not mandatory for invoices between private individuals.

Digital signatures offer a lot of?advantages:

• Security:?digital signatures contain security features to ensure that a legal document is not manipulated and that signatures are legitimate. Security features include asymmetric cryptography, personal identification numbers (PINs), as well as CA and trust service provider (TSP) validation.
• Timestamping:?this provides the date and time of a digital signature and is useful when the timing is critical, such as for legal proceedings, or lottery ticket issuance.
• Globally accepted and legally compliant:?with digital signatures becoming an international standard, more countries are accepting them as legally binding.
• Time savings:?digital signatures simplify the time-consuming processes of signing, storing, and exchanging physical documents, allowing companies to quickly access and sign documents.
• Cost savings and positive environmental effects:?organizations can save paper and money previously spent on the physical resources, time, staff and office space used to manage and transport documents, having a positive impact above all on the environment.
• Traceability:?when everything is recorded and stored digitally, there are fewer probabilities for a manual signee or record-keeper to make a mistake or lose something.

In order to perform a Qualified Electronic Signature, it is necessary to own a Qualified Digital Certificate. The issue of this certificate is subject to verification of the identity of the requester, by a Qualified Trust Service Provider. The issue of the certificate is accompanied by the delivery of security codes (in some cases, even a USB token or a smartcard). The security codes are strictly personal, generally produced using means that guarantee confidentiality (e.g., blind envelopes), and must never be shared with anyone.

If you want to have further information and deepen some aspects, read the article written by our colleague Marco Berardi, BL eGovernance, BU Defensive Security of Innovery. He provides a?useful guide to the recognition of the various types of Electronic Signatures, and the related field of application.

You can read the full article at the following link