Authors:
Thomas Lenz
;
Klaus Stranacher
and
Thomas Zefferer
Affiliation:
Secure Information Technology Center - Austria, Austria
Keyword(s):
Electronic Signatures, Verification, Testing, Web Services.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
e-Business
;
e-Business and e-Commerce
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Government
;
Internet Technology
;
Knowledge Management and Information Sharing
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Society, e-Business and e-Government
;
Symbolic Systems
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
;
Web Services and Web Engineering
Abstract:
The verification of electronic signatures represents a key component of security-sensitive applications. Signature-verification tools need to meet several requirements regarding security, reliability, usability, and accessibility. A conducted survey revealed that existing signature-verification tools often meet only a subset of these requirements. In most cases, available tools support a limited set of document and signature formats only, or do not feature appropriate interfaces that allow both end users and third-party applications to access the tool’s functionality in a convenient way. This complicates the development of electronic signature based third-party applications and reduces the usability for end users. To solve this problem, we propose a new architecture for Web based signature-verification tools. The proposed architecture follows a plug-in based approach that eases the integration of new signature formats and interfaces. The practical applicability of the proposed archit
ecture is demonstrated by means of a concrete implementation covering different use cases. This implementation demonstrates that the proposed architecture facilitates the realization of signature-verification tools that are able to meet all requirements of end users and third-party applications. This way, the proposed architecture and the implemented solution contribute to the security, usability, and efficiency of present and future electronic signature based applications.
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