RE: Electronic signatures and watermarking?

["Scan America" <ghewitt () scan-america com>]

Mark - 

You should take a close look at http://www.cic.com and
http://www.cic.com/products/signit/

This company specializes in digital and electronic signatures.  Actually
there are several types, ranging from the digitized / encrypted scanned
signature such as you are suggesting, all the way up to the much more secure
biometric signatures (which capture your pen's pressure, stroke, speed and
direction etc as you electronically sign a document for instance).  They
have solutions for several digital-signature applications, ranging from an
"authorization" type of convenience signature, such as to approve a vacation
request - to secured and encrypted signatures as described above. Audit
trails and legal signatures are even possible.

Once signed, the signature is encrypted and bound to the document.  The
document remains portable and can be sent to anyone and opened.  The
signature remains valid unless and until someone attempts to tamper with the
signature.  Double-clicking on the signed document's electronic signature
will query the signature, and it will respond with a dialog box telling
whether the signature is (still) valid, or if it has been altered.
Visually, the signature also shows a green checkmark or a red "X" next to
the digital signature to indicate if the signature is valid or not.

All these capabilities come with CIC's "Sign-it" product and it is only one
of their products.  I have prepared a multimedia demo for a presentation I
did on this topic to an AIIM audience (Association for Imaging and
Information Mgmt) and I can send it to anyone interested.

My specialty is electronic forms management systems and part of the solution
I recommend uses fillable PDF forms, in which we can design fields for
electronic signatures.  We use CIC and Sign-It if digital and/or electronic
signatures are required in the solution.

Of course, electronic signatures for e-Forms wouldn't help a great deal if
they could be fraudulently applied.  Nor would it be useful if they could be
applied but not verified.  And furthermore - in many workflow and reporting
scenarios, it is important to track the document after it has been signed
(hence the auditing & reporting capability).

I can and would say more, but I'll keep the commercialism out of this reply.
I'd be happy to do so off the list if anyone is curious about Sign-it or
e-Form systems in general.  I can say, though, that (1) I don't work for CIC
and (2) that CIC has a great product suite for a variety of electronic &
digital signature applications.

Gary M Hewitt, Pres
Scan America
Brookfield, WI

ghewitt () scan-america com
262-782-6407
------------------------------------------------------------------------

-----Original Message-----
From: GuidoZ [mailto:uberguidoz () gmail com] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 8:14 PM
To: Spencer, Mark
Cc: security-basics () securityfocus com
Subject: Re: Electronic signatures and watermarking?


Depending on how technical and secure you're looking for, I'd say do some
poking around the bank/check industry. After all, they are quite concerned
with fraudulent documents getting around.

I forget the exact website but there is an entire site based on a secure
paper and printing/signing. Some Googling will probably reveal it. Once
again, depending on your exact worries and concerns, using special paper
might be overkill. However, I'll betcha the bank industry (along with check
books and such) will lead to a wealth of information.

--
Peace. ~G


On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 08:10:01 -0700, Spencer, Mark <mspencer () evidentdata com>
wrote:
> On business documents (those that still live in the paper world) where 
> public/private keys and signature verification are unavailable, is 
> there a way to make an electronic signature (a handwritten one that 
> has been scanned in) more secure?  Possibly by watermarking?  Anyone 
> can scan in a handwritten signature and paste it into a document, but 
> I'm curious about how one might watermark or otherwise secure it.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Mark