Electronic document giant Adobe said that it was partnering with digital certificate company GeoTrust to provide technology that will allow documents that use Adobe's popular PDF to be digitally certified.

Tuesday, the companies issued a joint statement to announce a document signing service that pairs GeoTrust's True Credentials digital signing technology with Adobe's Acrobat document security software. The new service will make it possible for organizations to verify the authenticity of a document using a digital certificate, which the companies claim will help fight online fraud such as phishing scans and online identity theft.

The certified document service, or "CDS," was developed jointly by Adobe, of San Jose and GeoTrust, of Wellesley, Mass. The service is being marketed to businesses and organizations, such as financial services companies and government agencies, that want to deliver sensitive information to customers online without worrying about phishing and document forgery scams, said John Landwehr, group manager for security solutions and strategy at Adobe.

Reports from financial analysts and official government documents are just two areas where there is a market for secure signing technology, Landwehr said, using the recent controversy over possibly forged documents from the U.S. National Guard concerning the performance of President George Bush as an example of the need to verify the authenticity of important documents.

To use CDS, companies first apply for a digital certificate from GeoTrust. That company screens applicants and issues a digital token to those who pass the company's vetting process. Individual users are issued a private key for signing documents, which is encrypted and stored on an iKey USB token by SafeNet. To sign a document, users insert their iKey token into a USB slot on their computer, then use a "Save As Certified Document" feature in Adobe's Acrobat Version 6 software to digitally sign the PDF document, Landwehr said.

Users must enter a PIN number after entering the USB token in order to sign the PDF using their private key, he said.

For organizations, such as banks, that want to digitally certify large volumes of electronic documents, GeoTrust issues a digital certificate to the organization. That token can be stored on a iKey token or in a hardware security module such as SafeNet's Luna server-based key management system, which permits companies to sign documents more quickly. Adobe's LiveCycle Document Security software can then be used to access the key and rapidly sign documents prior to sending them out, Landwehr said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.