Re: [office] Digital signature proposal

[Michael Brauer <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM>]

Uri, all,

thank you very much for your feedback and suggestions.

Uri Resnitzky wrote:
> Malte,
> 

> 
> In any case, whatever decision is made on this, I think it is critical
> that the spec we're developing will not limit the addition of sectional
> signing by add-ons or future implementations. Requiring the application
> to consider a signature invalid because it is not applied to all files
> of the package will create such a limitation.
> 

As Malte explained in his reply, the current proposal does not add this 
limitation. It defines a document signature and a macro signature that 
both require that the signature is applied to certain streams, but it 
explicitly allows arbitrary other signatures, that do not have these 
restriction. So, if we would agree on this proposal, we still could add 
signed sections later.

> Regarding visual signatures - this is implemented in many applications
> and file formats, and is actually in everyday use today. Just two
> examples for file formats which 'natively' support visual signatures are
> PDF and OOXML. I can provide references to many signature products that
> add visual signatures as an add-on feature for popular proprietary
> binary format based applications. Again, we may be willing to volunteer
> to contribute an implementation of visual signatures to OOo.

A visual signature would be an extension of the current proposal, but 
would not have an influence on that proposal itself. I therefore think 
we should discuss this separately.

Best regards

Michael