Digital Signatures DII Workshop
This week, I registered for the next Document Interop Initiative (DII) workshop being held at Microsoft. (Details here)
The meet-up is centered around the new XML Advanced Electronic Signatures (XAdES) support in Office 2010. In my opinion, this is a great step forward for Office’s digital signature support, as XAdES provides the appropriate XML schemata to embed timestamps, revocation information and countersignatures within a digital signature on a document. Timestamp and embedded revocation support are two of the chief advantages that Acrobat digital signatures have held over Office for the past several years. Finally enabling this functionality will allow Office to compete with Acrobat on a more even playing field in terms of allowing robust, more auditable signature workflows.
I’m interested in seeing what updates, if any, have been made to the Office digital signature interface to support this new functionality. In current and previous versions of Office, digital signature validation, from a UI perspective, has been abysmal. There has simply been no way to determine *why* a signature is judged as invalid by Office when there are myriad possible causes for such a failure. For example, a signature may be invalid due to an altered document, which is far more of a concern than a signature being invalid due to revocation data being unavailable because the validation was performed offline. These circumstances can lead to different trust levels from the user.
It remains to be seen how well the XAdES support is implemented, but I’ll tentatively state, sight-unseen, that this is at least a step in the right direction.
