Method and system for signing and authenticating electronic documents via a signature authority which may act in concert with software controlled by the signer

#This invention, relates to a system and method for signing, storing, and authenticating electronic documents.

#The U.S. electronic signature law, “Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act,” defines an electronic signature as “an electronic sound, symbol, or process, attached to or logically associated, with a contract or other record executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record.”

#Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) has been used to create high quality electronic signatures on electronic documents. A PKI may consist of a set of key pairs from asymmetric cryptosystems where one key of the pair is identified as public and one as private, a set of entities, called subjects, that control private keys, and a set of rules or policies, defined by a Policy Authority, for managing the key pairs. The minimum set of rules typically stipulates that each private key must be kept as a secret of its subject and must be applied only under direction of the subject. The public key of the pair may be published or otherwise made known to other entities, along with information identifying its subject. Trustworthy entities called Certification Authorities may bind subject identity information to a public key using a data structure called a digital certificate, and another trustworthy entity called a Registration Authority may confirm the accuracy of the information identifying the subject. Certification Authorities maybe arranged in a network of trust relationships so that a party can trust the content of digital certificates made by one Certification Authority based on trust they may have of another Certification Authority.

#FIG. 1 is a block diagram of an Electronic Signature System with Presentation and Signature Authorities illustrating embodiments of the inventions.

#FIG. 2 illustrates a signing process of an electronic document in accordance with aspects of the present invention.

#FIG. 3 illustrates a certification authority with subordinate registration, presentation, and signature authorities in accordance with an aspect.

#the present invention provides several means by which an electronic signature can be created under the purview of a Signature Authority. The Signature Authority may work within the context of an electronic signature system, helping it provide comprehensive signature-related services, and may take advantage of trustworthy client components to improve the overall trustworthiness of the signatures.

#A Signature Authority is a trustworthy third party that participates in the formation of an electronic signature in a way that is critical to the trustworthiness of the resulting signature. A Signature Authority takes a to be signed document and a signature creation request, comprised (implicitly or explicitly) of an Instruction to sign a specific field of a to be signed document in a specific manner within a specific time period and attribute the signature to a specific entity, verifies that the entity to which the signature is to be attributed has actually authorized creation of this signature as specified by the request and then causes the signature to be created. The Signature Authority may also associate metadata with the signature, which may attest to the time and/or method of creation of the signature, or other types of information pertaining to the signature.

#A Signature Authority may work in concert with a Presentation Authority as illustrated in FIG. 1. A Presentation Authority is a trustworthy third party in an electronic signature system that manipulates a to be signed document to form a facsimile of it that is shown to the signer, where the facsimile is a fair representation of the original but has useful properties not present in the original.