In fact, digital signatures can be considered as even more reliable than wet-ink ones. With a digital signature pdf is well-protected. They are very reliable and resistant to forgery or fraudulent actions thanks to Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) standardized services widely adopted to generate, distribute, and control public keys. Digital signatures are easy to verify at the recipient’s side thanks to encryption algorithms with public keys. They are based on modern encryption algorithms. How secure are digital signatures?ĭigital signatures are very reliable. Digital signatures are now widely accepted and used in government, healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, financial services, and other industries. For such circumstances, the EU passed the EU Directive for Electronic Signatures in 1999, and the United States passed the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN) in 2000. In many jurisdictions, digital signatures not only verify that the document is true and not altered, but also have legal authority, i.e., making documents such as contracts legally binding-in the same way as documents with traditional pen-on-paper signatures. Non-repudiation-the person who signed the document cannot deny having signed it at a later time.Integrity-a valid digital signature on a document certifies that the document hasn’t been altered in transit from the one who signed it to the recipients.Authentication-a digital signature on a document authenticates the identity of the person who signed it.Uses of digital signatures for documentsĪ digital signature is a versatile method to sign documents in electronic form, which is used to provide the following: This message can then be decrypted by anyone else with a matching public key for verification. From a technology standpoint, a digital signature is a message encrypted by the signer using a secret private key, which associates itself with the document and the signer. A digital signature is an equivalent for digital documents, such as PDFs, of a wet-ink signature on paper documents. Once people started to rely on digital document exchange, the need for a digital means to confirm and verify authenticity of the documents arose.

In this article we’ll consider what is a digital signature PDF can be signed with, and how to use FineReader PDF 15 to apply digital certificates, create and verify digital signatures for your documents. When working with digital documents such as PDFs, people often ask how to create a digital signature and how to add digital signature to PDF.

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