[Infowarrior] - Digital signatures get Web standards nod

[Richard Forno]

Digital signatures get Web standards nod

By Stephen Shankland
http://news.com.com/Digital+signatures+get+Web+standards+nod/2100-1013_3-618
9527.html

Story last modified Thu Jun 07 16:51:48 PDT 2007


A standards group has completed work on digital signature technology
designed to ensure data authenticity between interacting Web servers.

Version 1.0 of the Digital Signature Services standard provides a
tamper-proof mechanism to provide electronic timestamps, postmarks or
official corporate imprimaturs. Members of the Organization for the
Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) gave the digital
signature standard its highest level of ratification, the standard group
said Thursday.

OASIS governs many emerging standards in the domain of Web services, a term
that refers to sophisticated interactions of different servers over the
Internet. With a digital signature Web service, a company could use a
separate server to handle the chore rather than building it directly into
each application that needed it.
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The digital signature standard has two components, one for the signature
itself and one for verification of the signature, OASIS said. So, for
example, a computer service could send a document to a server to receive a
digital signature or send a document and its signature to a server that will
verify the document's authenticity.

One organization that has an interest in digital signatures and that worked
with OASIS to develop the standard is the Universal Postal Union, a United
Nations agency. It's working to incorporate the digital signature standard
into its Electronic Post Mark system (UPU EPM), OASIS said.


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