New Standard For EU-Compliant Electronic Signatures 42
Posted
by
timothy
from the ja-das-war-ich dept.
from the ja-das-war-ich dept.
An anonymous reader writes "ETSI has published a multi-part standard that will facilitate secure paperless business transactions throughout Europe, in conformance with European legislation. The standard defines a series of profiles for PAdES — Advanced Electronic Signatures for PDF documents — that meet the requirements of the European Directive on a Community framework for electronic signatures (Directive 1999/93/EC)."
Re:Secure Paperless Business Transactions? (Score:2, Informative)
Are you claiming to be a better tool?
Re:Adobe Lobby machine (Score:4, Informative)
There are many ways to create PDFs and read PDFs without relying on Adobe. Mac OS X offers wide support for this format, every application that can print can create a PDF file. PDFs can be opened with Preview and many other applications understand it.
LaTeX can create PDF files either directly or with ghostscript, which creates PDFs out of Postcript files.
Many different libraries exist to create a PDF programmatically.
Not all implementations might be feature complete, but it's far from being as proprietary as Office from Microsoft.
Re:Adobe Lobby machine (Score:3, Informative)
You can download the full PDF spec with a pretty standard agreement. The biggest part of the agreement is that the pdf readers you write with the standard will enforce document "no printing/no copying" settings. You don't need to pay a fee that a lot of other standards require before they give the documentation.
PDF as a format is controlled by adobe, but it is open format in that everyone can implement readers and writers without restriction.
TS 102 778-x (Score:5, Informative)
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute's search page is at:
http://pda.etsi.org/pda/queryform.asp [etsi.org]
Search for "pades" in the title will get you the five parts of the standard (well, Technical Specification).
ETSI TS 102 778-x
And thank goodness it's ETSI doing this, since they publish their standards without charge.
Re:Adobe Lobby machine (Score:1, Informative)
PDF is now an ISO standard so theoretically no longer controlled by Adobe. The latest specification no longer includes the text about PDF readers enforcing document security settings in exchange for the permission to use the "copyrighted data structures".