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New Standard For EU-Compliant Electronic Signatures
An anonymous reader writes "ETSI has published a multi-part standard that will facilitate secure paperless business transactions throughout Europe, in conformance with European legislation. The standard defines a series of profiles for PAdES — Advanced Electronic Signatures for PDF documents — that meet the requirements of the European Directive on a Community framework for electronic signatures (Directive 1999/93/EC)."
It's good to see some progress being made in the formalization of standards for accepting electronic signatures. I'm reminded of the issues with conventional legal guidelines surrounding hand-written signatures, and look forward to cryptographically verifiable alternatives.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Are you claiming to be a better tool?
There are many ways to create PDFs and read PDFs without relying on Adobe. Mac OS X offers wide support for this format, every application that can print can create a PDF file. PDFs can be opened with Preview and many other applications understand it.
LaTeX can create PDF files either directly or with ghostscript, which creates PDFs out of Postcript files.
Many different libraries exist to create a PDF programmatically.
Not all implementations might be feature complete, but it's far from being as proprietary as Office from Microsoft.
But unless alternative PDF readers can verify electronic signatures, they'll be useless. And more importantly, unless alternative PDF writers can generate electronic signatures, they'll be useless. That's where the money is.
Exactly. I can read pretty much read any random PDF found on the net or sent to me, with my choice of tools (Adobe, xpdf, evince, etc). Likewise, I can produce postscript (which I can convert to pdf that can be read with the same choice of tools [Adobe, xpdf, evince, etc] ) with anything that can 'print' documents on my Debian system
I have yet to see anything approaching that level of interoperability, BY DEFAULT, using MS formats. And if it ever comes, it will be only after MS has lodged every possible protest and done everything else possible to prevent it.
I use PDF all the time on linux. I don't use a single adobe product, and I do use a commercial product for annotation. Thats not lock in.
You can download the full PDF spec with a pretty standard agreement. The biggest part of the agreement is that the pdf readers you write with the standard will enforce document "no printing/no copying" settings. You don't need to pay a fee that a lot of other standards require before they give the documentation.
PDF as a format is controlled by adobe, but it is open format in that everyone can implement readers and writers without restriction.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Anyone know if this will be implementable in free software? Are there patent/copyright issues?
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute's search page is at:
http://pda.etsi.org/pda/queryform.asp
Search for "pades" in the title will get you the five parts of the standard (well, Technical Specification).
ETSI TS 102 778-x
And thank goodness it's ETSI doing this, since they publish their standards without charge.
Yes, I found this a good reason to switch away from Adobe Reader; Apple's Preview (as well as being faster) lets me annotate any PDF. My workflow involves a lot of PDFs and no Adobe products at all. I generate images in PDF format from a variety of tools (GraphVis, OmniOutliner, GNUplot, and so on), incorporate them into documents using pdflatex and send them to my publisher. They annotate them and send them back, whereupon I review the annotations in Preview, make changes to the LaTeX source and then send them the final result for publication.
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