Digital Signatures Receive International Standards Ratification

On October 2002, members of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium formed a technical committee to develop open XML protocols for digital signatures operating in a Web services environment. Their primary purpose was to enable web services to produce and verify digital signatures. On June 7, 2007, OASIS announced that its members have approved the Digital Signature Services (DSS) version 1.0 as an OASIS digital signatures standard. DSS describes two XML-based request/response protocols, one for signatures and a second for verification. Using these protocols, a client can send documents to a server and receive back a signature on the documents; or can send documents and a signature to a server and receive back a response whether the signature verifies the documents. Prior to the development of DSS, implementing a secure signatures system was a complex challenge. Assigning and certifying user keys was difficult to secure as digital signature programs needed to be built into specific applications. By contrast, DSS allows a separate server to handle the digital signature process thereby removing the task of incorporating protocols to specific applications. The OASIS DSS Technical Committee worked closely with the Universal Postal Union, an agency of the United Nations, to facilitate the use of DSS within its Electronic Post Mark system. Additionally, many others participated in the standard's development such as the American Bar Association, IBM and Nokia. For a relevant news article, see: http://news.com.com/2100-1013_3-6189527.html For links to OASIS and related sites, visit: http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis-news-2007-06-07.php Summary by: Oren Weichenberg