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Digitally Notarized Documents in Brazil
Remote writes: "As of next year, Brazilians will be able to obtain notary-authenticated digital documents and have them sent over the Internet (English) . You can also obtain a CD or floppy from a notary office, containing your document encrypted with an assymetric key. The key generation, though, demands that one shows up in person at the notary office for ID verification. This was made possible by legislation that recognises public-key encrypted documents and signatures as legally valid. This is one first step, and I don't see why this wouldn't be applied to things like contracts, invoices, wills, etc. Brazilian Notary and Register Association claims that one can even print as many copies of, say, your driver license as desired, though I don't see how this part would work..."
And how could the police officer validate the digital signature? He would only look at the printed paper and it would seem all right to him.
Digital signatures only work with digital documents. A digital signature is a hash of the entire document signed with a private key ( in this case the notary's key ). When you print the document, how could you check the signature? Should you scan it back so a computer could validate it again? How could you be sure that what I scanned would generate the same bits of the original? Actually, you can't! So we would always have a bad signature!
Ricardo da Silva Lima
Internet based services are way behind where they should be. Something as basic as timestamping is still having trouble getting of the ground after several years. Think of all the things that you should be able to accomplish, simply (although not necessarily freely) but just can't yet.