The Signature - Then and Now
By: John Best | Posted: 11th February 2008
The earliest form of agreement authentication was the seal. The seal was first employed by the Sumerians, the inventors of writing, in the third millenium BC by empressing a pattern into clay tablets. The seal served as the primary authentication method throughout the early centuries of human history, evolving from impressions on clay tablets, to impressions in wax, to ink imprints made by carved wood blocks.
Use of signatures defined as a hand-written representation of one’s own name is first recorded in the Talmud Hebrew religious text in the fourth century. The practice of authenticating documents by affixing handwritten signatures was initially used within the Roman Empire in the year AD 439, during the rule of Valentinian III for authenticating wills. The subscripto - a short handwritten sentence at the end of a document stating that the signer "subscribed" to the document was added to the end of the document. The practice of affixing signatures to documents spread rapidly from this initial application to all types of applications. This was the foundation of the usage of signatures in Western legal tradition.
England passed "An Act for Prevention of Frauds and Perjuries," In 1677, which stipulated that "some note or memorandum in writing" that is "signed by the parties" must exist for certain types of transactions. This "Statute of Frauds" had a far reaching influence on U.S. commercial law, and was the antecedent of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), the basis for most U.S. state and Federal laws governing "transactions in goods."
The telegraph, first used in 1844, created the problem of authenticating electrically transmitted messages. In the case Trevor v. Wood, 36 N.Y. 307 in 1867, the court found that telegraphed "signatures" met the legal requirements for "written signatures" under the Statute of Frauds. This was the first legal precedent for an agreement authentication (or a "signature" in the broadest sense) transmitted by electronic means.
The next major event in the history of the signature was the introduction by NCR Corporation in 1991, of the first signature capture device for retail store checkout terminals. This was the first instance of the digitization of the pen movement producing a signature, and the storage of this signature in electronic form as authentication of a transaction.
In the early to mid 1990's, networked computers evolved into the internet, and E-commerce developed. This resulted in a pressing need for a means of agreement authentication to serve the function of the written signature. At the time, although there were dedicated point-of-sale signature pads, there was no means such as WebPen for capturing and digitizing a signature online. What developed was a scheme called "public key infrastructure" or PKI. This scheme became commonly known as a "digital signature" although it doesn't use a graphical signature.
An in-depth explanation of what PKI is, would likely be incomprehensible to anyone but a computer scientist, but in a nutshell, it is a variation of a username(public key)/password(private key) scheme in which a third party(certificate authority) is utilized for verification. Several vendors of similar PKI schemes arose and approach has been endorsed by governments worldwide in various legislation, beginning with U.S. Government’s Digital Signature Standard (DSS) in 1991. After years however, the PKI approach never really has gained widespread acceptance. The approach suffers from several problems:
It is confusing to users. It is wrapped in technical jargon too complex for the layman to understand.
The Private Key (password) is too long and complex to remember so it must be stored somewhere, exposing it to the possibility of theft.
It relies on a third party Certificate Authority. If (when) the certificate authority goes out of business, the digital signature can no longer be verified.
Expensive subscription fees must be paid for the service of the certificate authority. If these fees are not paid, the digital signatures utilizing the service become unverifiable.
The next step in the evolution of online document authentication was the introduction in 2006 by Toucanmultimedia.com of WebPen an online signature pad that utilizes the mouse as a pen.
While this approach suffers from the same weaknesses as a signature written with pen and ink, it offers several advantages over the PKI scheme:
Tradition and familiarity - authenticating documents by signing is a practice that everyone understands and is familiar with.
Legal Precedent - The handwritten signature, whether, written with a pen, drawn with a paintbrush, written with an electronic stylus, or drawn with a computer mouse, has been the universally accepted method of agreement authentication for centuries.
Electronic signature images can last forever with proper storage. There is no worry about a certificate authority going out of business.
It is free. there are no fees that must be paid to a certificate authority.
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Tags: human history, initial application, sumerians, roman empire, carved wood, antecedent, imprints