Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Cloud Signature Consortium Push for Standard on Digital Signatures

, Legaltech News

Adobe partners with 12 other groups in effort to establish practices around cloud-based digital signature technology to meet mobile signature demand.


Prompted by the upcoming adoption of the European Union's (EU) Regulation on Electronic Identification and Trust Services (eIDAS), a group of 13 companies led by Adobe has formed the Cloud Signature Consortium to push for an open standard for cloud-based digital signatures.


"The focus right now is because eIDAS is coming into effect on July 1, which is creating a unified standard," said Dan Puterbaugh, associate general counsel for Adobe. "This led the company to feel that the time was right for creating a unifying technological standard that would kind of dovetail that."

The eIDAS regulation, aiming to systematize e-signature technology and security, will mandate a set of e-signature requirements across the EU when it takes effect in July.

Lisa Croft, director of product market for Adobe's Document Cloud, explained that e-signatures can take countless different forms. "An electronic signature could be anything. You could be checking a box, it could be an image of your signature," she said.

The consortium hopes to submit and push for standards around digital signatures, a specific type of e-signature that includes a certificate to verify the signer's identity. Typically, the certificate is stored as an encrypted ID stored in a separate physical device, making it difficult to use digital signature technology via mobile devices.

"It's almost most easily understood as a notary-like process. In order to get that digital certificate in the most classic sense, you would actually show up at someone's office" to verify your identity, Puterbaugh said.

Though digital signature technology can be cumbersome, Puterbaugh hopes that the consortium can help establish an open standard that pairs the identity security of current digital signature technology with the ease of other e-signatures.

"When you're able to have that degree of certainty without having the high burden of the old method of getting a digital certification, you've got a combination there where you have all the efficiency, but you're also satisfying those more cautious departments like legal and corporate," he said.

Although the new EU regulation prompted Adobe and its affiliates to consolidate an effort to bring about an open standard for digital signatures, the group intends for its efforts to apply beyond the EU's 28 member states.

"The springboard is what's happening in the EU, but the plan and the goal of the initiative is for a global standard," Croft said.

The push for updated digital signatures is largely prompted by a need to help businesses find ways to secure transactions via mobile. "The industry has been fine, but the mobile need has really started to tip it. That's one of the reasons for the consortium," Croft said.

Though some technology has been developed to help companies conduct signature transactions via mobile phones, most of it requires vendor specificity.
"An open standard would eliminate this and truly provide mobile signatures," she added.

This isn't the first open standard Adobe has participated in pushing for—the company pioneered open standards around the PDF document format back in 2008. While Adobe may have the capacity alone to support widespread use of their own technology specifically, the company has moved toward collaboration and open standards because it mobilizes the entire industry to contribute new technology.

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