I'm Brendan Hyland. I help regulated facilities transform their software, spreadsheets, workflows and documents from time-consuming, deviation-invoking, regulatory burdens, to the competitive advantage they were meant to be. Join me every weekday as we take a few minutes to explore, design, test and improve the critical systems we use in our facilities.
How do you prove you're you when signing a document?
|
Last time we left off with a cliff-hanger of a question: How do you prove you're you when signing a document? There are several ways I've seen that the 3rd party providers prove that it's you who's signed the document:
Obviously these are very different levels of assurance. Then there's the level of control you have over the signature - can anyone with access to an email just sign? Or do you have to log in to the service with a password? Or perhaps you need some kind of card or device to use the signature? As you might expect, there are standards that dictate the identity and security requirements behind different levels of electronic signatures - most prominently the Advanced Electronic Signatures (AdES) and Qualified electronic Signatures (QES) that have been adopted in the European Union. AdES guarantees that there's been identity verification, whereas QES add stringent requirements for, among other things, a qualified certificate and a device, such as a USB token, that you use to sign documents. Until next time, thanks for reading! – Brendan p.s. Enjoy this message? Read more at the Hyland Quality Systems website. |
The Daily HaiQu
I'm Brendan Hyland. I help regulated facilities transform their software, spreadsheets, workflows and documents from time-consuming, deviation-invoking, regulatory burdens, to the competitive advantage they were meant to be. Join me every weekday as we take a few minutes to explore, design, test and improve the critical systems we use in our facilities.
Last time we learned about the difference between an electronic signature - basically any way of signing a document electronically - and a digital signature, which is a cryptographic mechanism that can be used to implement electronic signatures, among other things. Modern digital signatures most often use the Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI, to generate and verify keys. So for you to properly e-sign your document (and I'm really simplifying things for illustration here) you need three...
There are several levels of 'signatures' that you can apply to an electronic document. The first and most basic is just an image of your written signature. One common option for this is to print the document, sign and scan it back in again. A more convenient version is to have an image of your signature saved that you can paste into documents. This is what many free versions of pdf software and word processors offer as a basic document signing option - a 'stamp' of your saved signature image....
Ever since COVID, document and signing workflows have been incorporated into everything. Dropbox has it. Microsoft Teams has it. Google Workspaces has it. If you need e-signatures, you probably have access to Docusign, Adobe, Hellosign, and so on. But what exactly are we talking about when we say "document and signing workflow"? Let's step back. Most document workflows are about moving some work through review, commentary, revision and approval. The old way to do this was to send a document...