 | What is a digital signature? The first thing to understand about digital signature technology is that it is not an electronic picture of your "John Hancock." It is not a digitized image of your handwritten signature. Matter of fact, a digital signature has nothing to do with handwriting at all. Indeed, you might more accurately think of it as resembling a "warp signature" on Star Trek." A digital signature is just the cyber space way of achieving the same thing. The digital signature provides proof of the sender's identity, as well as, the proof of the integrity of the data. The digital signature contains a hash value which uniquely identifies the data. The hash is an algorithm that converts the data into a unique number. If anything is changed, the number will change, thereby making it possible to detect any changes. To produce the digital signature, the hash value (transformed from the data) is encrypted with the sender's private key. A digital signature is a mathematical formula that creates two related keys: a public key and a private key. When someone wants to send a digitally signed electronic document, the document is created and then run with the mathematical formula found in the sender's private digital signature token, creating a "hash result." A hash result looks like this: Idkf1kmejsdaoif344lk1k08+kdak | ||
 | |||
 | |||
 | |||
 | |||
 | |||
 | |||
 | |||
 |
