Adobe does document security
By
Paul Roberts
,
IDG News Service
, 10/06/2004
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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.
PDF documents that have been signed display a blue ribbon in the Acrobat Reader application tray, akin to the "lock" icon
commonly displayed on the bottom margin of Web browsers when viewing Web sites that use SSL, Landwehr said.
The goal is to make it easier for organizations to begin using digital documents for critical business communications instead
of paper-based forms, making business processes that rely on those forms more efficient and easier to automate, according
to a statement by Ivan Koon, senior vice president of the Intelligent Document business unit at Adobe.
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
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