All about Electronic Signatures
Anyone who is not accustomed to this may feel confused on what electronic signature is about and to how the different types of e-signature is different in regards to legality and evidential power. Initially, any mark on electronic document may be used to capture the intent of signer to either accept or approve the content of that particular document. It is not important on how the sign is created or the form of mark. Instead, the most significant part needed to be done is proving who made the mark and ensuring that the document is not tampered.
As you read this article, you are going to learn about the types of electronic signatures used in today’s time.
Number 1. Click-to-Sign signatures – normally, these include of scanned images, typed names, e-squiggles as well as tick boxes. When using this category of signature, there isn’t cryptographic protection for the document. With this being said, these signatures are not enough to provide strong evidence of who have really signed or protect the doc from further changes. There is a possibility that it might be just cut and pasted from another document.
Number 2. Basic electronic signature – these are going to need the signer to apply their hand signature mark on the document and then, it’ll be protected by making use of cryptographic digital signature. Through basic e-signatures, it creates crypto digital signature using server held signing key like for instance, belonging to a service provider organization. It is for the same reason why this is also called as “Witness” digital signature.
Number 3. Qualified and advanced e-signatures – if you are looking for something that delivers the highest level of assurance and trust for signing keys on every signer, then you should look for AES and QES or Advanced Electronic Signature and Qualified Electronic Signature respectively. This links directly to the identity of the user to signed document such that anyone could verify it on their own using industry standard PDF reader. Take note that these are otherwise referred to as digital signatures than e-signatures.
Not just that, the signer has the only control of their private signing key which guarantees non-repudiation even if the service provider is not responsible for the creation of signature. Remote signing has plenty of benefits which include the ability of signing from any machine without using specialist devices similar to hardware tokens, readers and smartcards.
Actually, QES are more of a trusted version of AES since it requires higher level of security in protecting the signing key of user and formal registration process at the same time to verify their identity through qualified Certificate Authority.