Sunday, April 13, 2008

Digital signature -A new era of secure economic transactions.


The digital signature is the most fascinating application of cryptography these days and as per my intuition, it is going to be utilized and developed all over the world in a few more years. We were having a techfest called ADVAITA this year.I decided to go over there and present a paper with my branch colleague Sumeet. Thinking of some good papers I had the idea of this paper on my mind. At first, I was not at all confident of getting success because being in 4th Sem means there is no way of having knowledge about cryptography, still we managed to mug up some of the cryptographic algorithms alongside loads of research in the development activities in this area. Luckily we were not asked any kinda questions about core cryptographic algorithms; that is how we had a narrow escape. So, after all, we managed to get the second position but what I feel good at is I got some special kind of confidence after presenting the paper due to the fact that we were able to present our assessments and analysis. It is not about winning something but the place is for proving yourself before nobody but yourself only. Below follows the abstract of our paper.


Digital signature –The new era of secure economic transactions

There are many ways of applying cryptography and one of the many is “Digital signature” which is also known as “advanced electronic signature”. The person who is signing a document can see his signature as an ordinary signature whereas, his signature is invisible as a digital signature. This is a basic difference between an ordinary signature and a digital signature. This paper presents you an overview of the digital signature concept.
Digital signatures can be used to authenticate the source of messages. Authentication provides the means of ensuring the identity of a user; a digital time stamp bound to information can establish when it was created; the digital signature itself can be used to prove who sent a document, and prevent the originator repudiating ownership. When ownership of a digital signature secret key is bound to a specific user, a valid signature shows that the message was sent by that user. The importance of high confidence in sender authenticity is especially obvious in a financial context. If a message is digitally signed, any change in the message will invalidate the signature. Furthermore, there is no efficient way to modify a message and its signature to produce a new message with a valid signature, because this is still considered to be computationally infeasible by most cryptographic hash functions.
So digital signature thus helps cryptography to prove itself. Assistance is required from the law to help it attain the functional element of non-repudiation. Once non-repudiation has been achieved, then and only then, can electronic commerce be expected for any constructive purposes?