How can your business leverage the power of digital signatures?
The year is March 2020 and President Uhuru Kenyatta has finally signed the Business Law (Amendment) Bill, 2019 into law. The law has amended the Kenya Information and Communication Act to allow electronic authentication and signing of documents. What does this mean for your business? follow this series to understand how digital signatures work and how you can leverage their power in your business. First, lets understand how they work.
Introduction to digital signatures
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in the past, the authenticity of many legal, financial, and other documents was done by the presence of an authorized handwritten signature, this method was prone to forgery hence the need for digital signatures was realized to authenticate documents.
What is a Digital Signature?
-A digital signature is nothing but an attachment to any piece of electronic information, which represents the content of the document and the identity of the owner of that document uniquely
Motivation behind Digital signatures
-To provide Authenticity, Integrity and Non-repudiation to electronic documents.
-To use the Internet as the safe and secure medium for e-Commerce and e-Governance
Basic Requirements
1)Private Key
The private key is one which is accessible only to the signer. It is used to generate the digital signature which is then attached to the message.
2)Public Key
The public key is made available to all those who receive the signed messages from the sender. It is used for verification of the received message
3)Digital signature certificate
-A subscriber of the private key and public key pair makes the public key available to all those who are intended to receive the signed messages from the subscriber.
-But in case of any dispute between the two sides, there must be some entity with the receiver which will allow the receiver of the message to prove that the message was sent by the subscriber of the key pair. This can be done with the Digital Signature Certificate.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Digital signatures
Advantages
- AuthenticationIdentification of the person that signsDigital signatures provide for a sure way to prove the true identity of a document signer
- Integrity of dataEvery change will be detected.this ensures for integrity of data as any defects can be detected
- Non repudiationBecause the author cannot be denied of his work (he created and sent).Document signer has proof of content ownership
- IntergrationAble to integrate with O365 appsdigital signatures are able to integrate with O365 applications making their deployment very fast
Disadvantages
- Expiryshort shelf life.In this era of fast technological advancements, many of these tech products have a short shelf life.
- Certificates costone has to buy digital certificates.In order to effectively use digital signatures, both senders and recipients may have to buy digital certificates.
- Software CostParties must buy verification software at a costTo work with digital certificates, senders and recipients must buy verification software at a cost
- Offline verificationCannot be used offlinesince it requires a digital platform, this cannot be implemented offline
Now that you have a basic understanding of how digital signatures work, follow my next blog in this series on how your business can leverage the power of digital signatures.