Delivering Advanced Electronic Signatures - via a central signing server

The notion of Advanced Electronic Signature was introduced in the European Directive for electronic signature, which remains today an important milestone for the standardization and legal recognition of electronic signatures. Advanced Electronic Signatures (hereinafter AdES) offer a very practical method to protect information and provide trust in electronic business. They can be embedded in popular document formats such as PDF, XML and CMS messages  and are also the base stone for creating qualified electronic signatures (QES)

Art. 2 of the directive contains some requirements on signatory identification and. This paper describes how a central signature server can fulfill these requirements. This article relates to the European Commission Standardisation mandate m460 to CEN and ETSI on electronic signatures and is proposed as input for the ETSI standard prTS 14167-5.

Where 2FA and PKI Meet

Under pressure from sophisticated attacks and rising fraud, many B2C organisations of the financial industry are currently enhancing the static password based authentication to their web applications to something stronger - the 2FA age. 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) is currently achieving large scale deployments and consumer adoption where PKI failed a few years ago. From a technical standpoint, PKI offers significant benefits including the possibility to...