The signer himself, issuing the recipient with satisfactory proof, can give such information. Another way is to have it confirmed by a trust service provider (e.g. an authority trusted by one or more parties). The fallowing paragraph pertains to how a digital signature works. “The sender creates a message digest of the document he or she wants to send, and encrypts it using the private key. The message, containing the document and the ‘signature,’ is then sent to the recipient. If the sender desires privacy, the message is encrypted. The recipient applies the sender’s public key to the digital signature. He or she does this to retrieve the message digest from the digital signature that the sender created prior to sending. Next, the recipient creates a new message digest from the message received and compares that to the one that was inside the digital signature. If the two are the same, then the message was truly sent by the sender and arrived unaltered,” according to (Grant, 35).“PKI involves the use of two cryptographic keys, one private and one public. Information encrypted with one key in the pair can only be decrypted with the other key. Private keys are generally stored on the user’s hard drive. The publicly available key is embedded in a certificate with personal details about the user. The key is easily distributed through a Web browser. Thus, PKI provides the essential services for managing certificates and encryption keys for the people, programs and systems that use public-key cryptography, states Hammar.” Electronic means of communications are a serious challenge for the security and protection of transactions and relations conducted electronically. The new technologies require a relevant legal basis both on national and international level. The classical regulations are based on the requirement for a paper-based document and hand-written signatures. An electro...
