Understanding Digital Signatures: Establishing Trust over the Internet and Other Networks details the business, legal, social, and technological issues surrounding Digital Signatures and public key infrastructure. This book explains this complex technology in terms that a businessperson can understand, covering the unique problems of on-line authentication, how digital signatures help to solve these problems, ways companies are using the technology in real life and issues with its usage. The book includes a list of product and service vendors, future potential and suggestions for companies considering implementation of digital signatures for their customers or employees.
Digital signatures are a means to do online what written signatures do in person. Based on powerful modern cryptography, digital signatures verify that people sending communication are really who they say they are and bind people to their agreements after the fact. Written with the businessperson in mind,
Understanding Digital Signatures whittles away the complex mathematics of this online security element and lays out the concepts that make it work. Author Gail Grant's goal is to show how digital signatures can promote online trust in the same manner as a signature on a contract or a photo on a driver's license.
Grant begins with the basics, showing how security problems evolved and what they entail. She explains the five elements of security: authenticating that people are who they say they are, assuring they are authorized to do what they want to do, guaranteeing that private communications remain private, guarding data from being fraudulently changed, and making certain that others cannot deny responsibility for the consequences of their actions by pretending that they were not really the ones acting. Grant then looks at digital signatures from a businessperson's point of view, using case studies to explore how the technology is currently being used in the business world and what uses are planned for the immediate future.
She covers many surrounding issues, such as the legal responsibilities of those who certify digital signatures, the legislation required to truly make digital signatures the working equivalent of an autograph on a contract, and the business policies required to let companies take advantage of the technology while protecting themselves and their customers. Grant wraps up the book with a preview of up-and-coming applications.
