EU report on digital signatures - "standards deficit"

["Anders Rundgren" <anders.rundgren@telia.com>]

A 200p+ report:

http://www.europa.eu.int/information_society/eeurope/2005/all_about/security/electronic_sig_report.pdf

It is interesting to note that the authors are saying the same thing
as I regarding the status of signature systems.  That is, these
systems are currently proprietary, often only documented in national
languages, and having zero interoperability with respect to other
solutions.   The authors also rightfully claim that this has a negative
impact on the´market acceptance of digital signatures, which in my
opinion spills over to the acceptance of PKI as whole.

The authors conclude that the EU should define standards for
signature systems to be used for on-line services.  Well, they
don't actually use the term on-line services, but since signed
e-mail using S/MIME is both standardized and working, it is
really the on-line signature schemes that suffer from a rather
severe "standards deficit" (my wording).

Anders