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Subject: Re: [office] Digital signature proposal


On Tuesday 20 February 2007 15:03, Uri Resnitzky wrote:
> I would like to propose a functional extension to your proposal.
> From our experience with digital signature for documents in the
> marketplace and from looking at the digital signature functionality in
> other document formats such as PDF and OOXML, I believe that visual
> signatures are extremely important.
> Your proposal creates invisible signatures in the sense that the
> signature is not visible in the document content itself.
> I think we should amend the proposal to include the option of adding an
> interactive signature field (or signature line) to the document with the
> ability to display in this field the graphical signature image of the
> signer as well as other information (signer name, date/time, validity
> marks).

Any signature has, by nature, a reference to the name / email of the signer.
If the signature is to be checked, that information needs to be present on the 
computer of the one checking if the signature is relevant.

This has the effect that if you get a signed document from me, you can only be 
sure it is actually from _me_ by checking against your local key from me.  So 
sending any such info in the ODF is useless and counter productive.
After all, if you receive a document with my name and a signature you don't 
have (because its false, for example) you might just think that since the 
name is OK, the document must be OK. And that silly computer doesn't know me.

In the end a gpg signature thus needs a gpg public key. And that key holds my 
name, email and other data like a picture (optional).
So, for your request all that is needed is support from the application, and 
its actually a bad idea to add ODF support for it.

Cheers!
-- 
Thomas Zander

PGP signature



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