eSign
Digitally Sign
Your Documents
It is now legally possible to forward
your contract notes and other documents to your clients / business associates
without printing them. You may even forward a signed document over e-mail and that
is a valid proof in court of law in India. This is called digitally signing
your documents. A digital signature is endorsed to the document that needs to
be singed. The recipient can not only preserve and produce before various
government authorities whenever required but also can verify that the document
is properly signed or not.
When doing bulk mailing like sending
few hundred contracts / bills on daily bases and having to print the documents,
sign them, courier them is by itself very painful job. The cost involved and
the time lag in making this documents reach the client / recipient is also an
important factor. Just because the document needs to be signed by a person,
such huge cost of handling documents apart from delayed information is something
not advisable in the current environment.
How
this works?
A person who wishes to sign his
documents digitally needs to buy a digital signature ID from certifying
agencies. At present ‘SAFESCRYPT’ and ‘TCS’ provide digital
signatures in India to individuals who wish to do so. So in an organization,
directors and other officers who wishes to sign documents digitally, should
obtain digital signature ID. Once a digital signature ID is received he needs
to install the same on his computer(s) from where he would be endorsing the
signatures to the documents. Once installed, he can use various software(s) to
sign his documents.
For example, once the ID is installed
on his machine, he can configure his outlook to send all/selective mails being
forwarded from his particular mail account to be digitally signed.
Working
with Back office software
Most of the documents that are
forwarded to clients / business associates are generated from one software or
the other. The back office software may be in position to generate file that
may be individually signed using software, but in doing so the entire purpose
of the digital signature is defeated as there is manual intervention before it
is signed and may be tempered before being signed unless the person who is
supposed to sign generates the file himself. So you will appreciate that there
should be a total end to end product that does everything seamlessly and not
leave any room for miscreants and flaws.
The back office software will not even
send the mail to outlook express, from where it has to wait for connection
before being forwarded. Back office software will forward them directly to
outgoing server i.e. beyond a point of access.
Acer
eSolutions Pvt. Ltd. has now incorporated capability to digitally sign
documents in it’s back office software as:
Product |
Digitally signed Documents |
‘TRADEPLUS’
(Windows Version) Back office software for Equity and
Derivatives segment for brokers on various exchanges. |
Daily
Contracts, Bills, Ledger, Account Confirmations |
‘TRADEPLUS’
(DOS Version) |
Daily
Contracts |
‘CROSS’ Back office software for DP on CDSL |
Holding
& Transaction statements, Bills, Ledgers |
‘ESTRO’ Back office software for DP on NSDL |
The above
back-office packages will have option to digitally sign the documents before
they are e-mailed. Client can have various persons signing the document and
when there are multiple IDs installed on same machine, it shall ask for the
person who is to sign the document and his associated password.
Working
without Back office software
If the documents you wish to forward
are not generate from software other than software provided by us, i.e.
developed by some other vendor, still you can use our digital signature module,
the module also provides an option to load files generated by any other
software or for that matter generated manually. A complete log of import
activity is recorded along with user name, date, time, location from where
loaded etc.
A connection into your database or
data entry is possible to update and maintain e-mail addresses of clients.
Technical Details
A digital ID is composed of a “public
key,” a “private key,” and a “digital signature.” When you digitally sign your document,
you are adding your digital signature and public key to the document. The
combination of a digital signature and public key is called a “certificate.”
Using various application software, you can sign a document / mail.
There is another aspect to digitally
signing the document and that is encrypting the message. To send encrypted
messages, your address book must contain digital IDs for the recipients. That
way, you can use their public keys to encrypt the messages. When a recipient
gets an encrypted message, their private key is used to decrypt the message for
reading.
Digital IDs are issued by
certification authorities. When you apply for a digital ID at a certification
authority's Web site, they verify your identity before issuing an ID. There are
different classes of digital IDs, each certifying to a different level of
trustworthiness. For more information, logon to www.safescrypt.com
With “revocation checking,” you can
verify the validity of a digitally signed message. When you make such a check,
Outlook Express requests information on the digital ID from the appropriate
certification authority. The certification authority sends back information on
the status of the digital ID, including whether the ID has been revoked.
Certification authorities keep track of certificates that have been revoked due
to loss or termination.
Approaches
In this approach, outgoing messages
are digitally signed. The recipient will get digital signature as attachment to
the mail. If he is using mail manager like outlook express or Netscape for
incoming mails, he will be able to view a symbol of digitally signed message
and from properties he can view details of person signing the message. The
advantage of digitally signing the message is that the recipient can very
easily make out the digital signature and can also preserve the mail by saving
the mail. He does not require any verifier to verify the authenticity of the
signature and he can also check for revocation.
The limitation to this approach is
that if the recipient is not using mail manager like Outlook or Netscape, he
may see the signature as attachment and has almost no means to check the
authenticity of the signature.
In this approach, the document can be
digitally signed and the signature details are stored in a separate file. Both
document and the file together make a digitally signed document. Both the files
may be sent to the recipient to form a valid digitally signed document. The
files may be bundled in a zip file and forwarded to the recipient by the back
office application so in a way for the user it hardly matters. The advantage of
forwarding digitally signed document is that any type document file can be
digitally signed. For the matter it may be ·DOC, ·XLS, ·HTM, ·TXT file or for that matter
even data files like ·DBF, ·MDB etc. Another advantage of
the method is that the files being bundled in zip can be forwarded to someone
else via mail or copying it on a floppy etc. The limitation with this method is
that the recipient would require some utility to verify the authenticity of the
signatures. This may be provided by the sender on his website.
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