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Electronic communication poses security risks. Digital signatures are a powerful way to ensure that data is sent to the intended recipient without being tampered with. The process involves hashing and encryption, and requires software on both ends.
Nowadays a large amount of communication takes place electronically. People send emails, faxes and files with the help of computers. With every single file sent electronically, even emails, there is the possibility of a security breach.
Hackers live for the challenge, but they make a living without the challenge. To protect the data you transfer electronically, you may want to invest in a digital signature. This is a powerful and technologically advanced way to ensure that your release reaches only the intended recipient. A digital signature is an electronic signature that can be attached to documents to prove that the original content is still the content of the record. In other words, a document containing a digital signature has been certified by the sender as compliant with his intentions and has not been altered by unintentional third parties.
One of the main components of a digital signature is its timestamp. This tells both the sender and recipient the exact time the file was sent. The sender can match the timestamp to his email or other file transfer method to prove that no one intercepted the file and tampered with his data in transit, or worse, stole his data forever so the transfer doesn’t has ever taken place.
A digital signature is usually the product of a dedicated software application, although it can be included as part of another application. A computer’s random number generator feature generates a series of 0s and 1s that make up a sequence of letters and numbers to protect your data by allowing the intended recipient to verify that the file was encrypted according to your specifications.
Technically, the digital signature process destroys digital data and all aspects of it in a handful of lines of code. This process is called hashing and the resulting set of code is called a message digest. The digital signature software then encrypts the message digest. On the other hand, a decryption program is needed to transform the message digest back into an “unhashed” document.
Something else is happening here too. The person creating the digital signature uses a private data “key” to perform the hash. Its other “key”, a public one, is known to the intended recipient. When the sender transmits data using the digital signature, the recipient enters the sender’s public key and is able to decrypt the document. Only if the sender’s private key, which the recipient doesn’t see, is intact, will the file appear flawless, as expected.
You don’t have to be a code expert to use a digital signature. You just need to have the necessary software on both sides of the digital signature equation. Only then can you be sure that your transferred documents are safe from start to finish.
