Legal Digital Signature, About new XML software solutions papers and latest secure electronic articles.

To sign a Legal Digital Signature file, a publisher obtains public and private keys from an independent 'Certificate Authority' (Microsoft does not provide such keys.) The public key is a kind of certificate that identifies a specific publisher. The publisher uses a 'signing tool' to sign each file using their private key. Publishers will only need to obtain one set of keys from a Certificate Authority. These can be used to sign any file they produce, since a signature identifies a publisher not a specific Legal Digital Signature file.

Legal Digital Signature, how publishers sign their files?

We have released a font signing tool that publishers can use to sign True-Type and Open-Type fonts. In addition to actually adding the digital signature to the font file, the tool will perform tests to help publishers ensure their fonts conform to the published font specifications and do not contain serious bugs. The signatures themselves are formed using industry standards (standard hashing algorithms and standard signature formats). -Legal Digital Signature

Legal Digital Signature, How operating systems validate signatures?

In most circumstances Legal Digital Signature signed files will be treated differently than unsigned files by operating systems and applications. Current versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, for example, provide a different set of warnings when downloading unsigned files from the Internet than when downloading files that have been signed. The way in which future Microsoft operating systems will deal with signed and unsigned fonts, is still being decided. However, it is important for publishers to start signing their fonts as soon as possible. It is possible that many corporations will adopt a policy of only allowing signed files on their networks. In the future it will be possible for system administrators to implement company wide policies to prevent employees from installing unsigned software, including Legal Digital Signature unsigned fonts.

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