Implementació de nous sistemes de signatura digital a l’aplicació PortaSigma

Abstract

After a long time period using hand-written signatures and according to new times in which new technologies are present in daily live, it's time to make a transition towards digital signatures. A digital signature aims for three purposes: first, to univocally identify a document's signer; second, to ensure that this document has not been altered; and finally third, to prevent signer's repudiation. Therefore, digital signature allows to break with time, space and money constraints associated to manual signature. PortaSigma is a web application developed by Isigma company in 2009 in order to contribute towards the transition from hand-written to digital signature. So far, PortaSigma provides with tools to sign documents using digital certificates that are recognized (as valid certificates) within the country of application. Nevertheless, for those environments in which a recognized certificate is not available, it is necessary to provide new methods to ensure the validity of signatures. In this project, we have implemented new digital signature systems into the PortaSigma software covering the following topics: 1) to allow to digitally sign documents with a smartphone; 2) to use digital certificates recognized only within the customer-company context to digitally sign with PortaSigma; and 3) a client-side signature system that overcomes the constrains of current signature systems that are based on an applet running within the web browser. The latter is a rather novel solution that may be implemented into PortaSigma in the future, once the applets life will be close to its end.