Re: [dss] Suggestion for new work - profile for visible signaures

[Andreas Kuehne <kuehne@klup.de>]

Hi John, Uri !

This proposal sounds useful to me, too.
I didn't had a need for the visual aspects mentioned by URI, by a 
profile handling signing and verification of PDF files would be very 
useful.

Besides I guess it's in Nick's list I like to name the ebXML profile as 
a 2.0 activity.

Greetings

Andreas

>  I agree. Federal judges in the United States are requesting such a
>  feature for electronic orders being issued from their courts, and the
>  preference comes up in many other legal/commercial contexts.

>  > -------- Original Message --------
>  > I would like to suggest that the DSS TC develop a new profile to 
> handle
>  > visible signatures.
>  >
>  > This profile will enable a client to submit a document to the server 
> and
>  > ask that the document be signed after adding a signature field / 
> block
>  > to a certain page in certain coordinates and dimensions. The 
> signature
>  > block could have some text attributes displayed such as signer's 
> name
>  > (taken from the signer certificate's Subject Common Name attribute 
> for
>  > example), signature date/time, etc. In addition the signature block
>  > could have some graphic elements such as a graphical signature image
>  > held by the server in association with the signer's key, a company 
> logo,
>  > etc. Additional features may include supporting multiple signature
>  > fields in the same document, sectional signatures, etc.
>  >
>  > The main advantage of this profile would be in connection with 
> document
>  > formats which natively support interactive visible digital signature
>  > fields. One such (non-XML) format is PDF (recently announced to be
>  > submitted as an ISO standard). Other formats may include the 
> XML-based
>  > OASIS ODF and Microsoft OOXML, as well as non-XML formats such as 
> TIFF,
>  > etc.
>  >
>  > An interesting challenge would be to design the profile in a generic
>  > manner so that it can support as many features without being tied to 
> any
>  > specific file type.
>  >
>  > In my experience visual signatures (and especially graphical 
> signature
>  > images) greatly enhance the user acceptance and usability of a 
> digital
>  > signature system.
>  >
>  > The profile can also cover auxiliary activities such as:
>  > 1. adding an empty signature field into a document (specifying at
>  > document/template design time where signature lines should be in the
>  > document, who should sign them, etc)
>  > 2. registering a graphical signature image to be associated with a
>  > certain signing key.
>  > 3. enumerating signature fields and extracting various attributes
>  > While not directly involved with the calculation or verification of 
> a
>  > digital signature, these auxiliary activities are useful when 
> building
>  > on overall solution for document signing. Of-course such activities 
> can
>  > also be left aside to be specified as an additional profile or 
> protocol.
>  >
>  > Thanks,
>  >
>  > - Uri
>  >
>  > Uri Resnitzky
>  > Chief Scientist
>  > ARX
>  > http://www.arx.com

___________________________________________________
Andreas Kühne
phone: +49 177 293 24 97
mailto: kuehne@trustable.de

Trustable
Kirchröder Str. 70e
30625 Hannover
Germany
www.trustable.de

Kostenlose Verifikation qualifizierter elektronischer Signaturen:
www.sig-check.de