The American Bar Association provided a very elaborate, thorough, and detailed guideline on all the legal aspects of digital signature schemes and a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) solution such as X.509 at a time when PKI was still quite novel (1996). The stated purpose was to establish a safe harbor—a secure, computer-based signature equivalent—which will
- 1.
minimize the incidence of electronic forgeries,
- 2.
enable and foster the reliable authentication of documents in computer form,
- 3.
facilitate commerce by means of computerized communications, and
- 4.
give legal effect to the general import of the technical standards for authentication of computerized messages.
This laid the foundation for so-called Certificate Policy Statements (CPS) issued by Certification Authorities (CA), the purpose of which is to restrict the liability of the CA. It is fair to state that often these CPS are quite incomprehensible to ordinary users.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 International Federation for Information Processing
About this entry
Cite this entry
Landrock, P. (2005). ABA digital signature guidelines. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA . https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-23483-7_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-23483-7_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-23473-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-23483-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering