What are Digital Signatures?

Digital signatures are used to authenticate digital information — such as documents, PDFs, e-mail messages, and VBA macros — by using cryptography delivered through a GlobalSign Digital ID and SafeNet HSMs. Digital signatures help to establish the following assurances:

• Authenticity – the digital signature helps to assure that the signer (such as the document author or the email sender) is who he or she claims to be
• Integrity – the digital signature helps to assure that the content of the document or email has not been changed or tampered with since it was digitally signed
• Non-repudiation – the digital signature helps to prove to all parties the origin of the signed content. “Repudiation” refers to the act of a signer’s denying any association with the signed content
• Enables PDF security – including document integrity, authorship and time-stamping
• No plug-ins or extra software needed – Certified PDFs & Approval Signatures are automatically recognised by Adobe Acrobat and the free Adobe Reader
• Cost Effective – with a variety of purchase options, we have a solution to fit any budget.

ICT Security specialises in implementing GlobalSign Adobe CDS and Office Signing for enterprise customers who require a comprehensive digital signing solution.

DocumentSign for Adobe Secure PDF

Certified Document Services (CDS) is the first digital signing solution that allows authors to create Adobe® PDF files that automatically certify to the recipient that the author’s identity has been verified by a trusted organization.

Authors of PDFs add digital Certifying Signatures and Approval Signatures to documents they distribute over the Internet. The process is the virtual equivalent to sealing a document and adding wet-ink signatures and assuring the recipient that the document is authentic, comes from a verified source, and the contents have not been tampered with since being published.

GlobalSign is an authorized participant in Adobe’s Certified Document Services (CDS) program and operates under a stringent set of policies and standards developed by Adobe and audited by WebTrust to allow GlobalSign to issue Adobe recognized CDS Certificates, branded as DocumentSign Digital IDs, to individuals and departmental entities.

DocumentSign users can add Certifying and Approval Signatures to PDFs using a trust model used in Adobe Reader 6.0+ without installing any new plug-ins, configuring Adobe Reader/Acrobat to non-default settings, or needing to make confusing trust decisions.