Digital Signature Service Standard Announced

With our increased reliance on electronic documents to transact business, the need for digital signatures has increased specifically as it relates to security in eCommerce transactions. OASIS, the Organization for Structured Information Standards (www.oasis-open.org ), announced yesterday the approval of Digital Signature Services (DSS) standard. This standard provides a secure way for organizations to authenticate documents in an electronic environment.

DSS, is an XML-based interface to allow web services based applications to use digital signatures. According to the scope of the standard, it describes two XML-based protocols that define XML-request/response protocols for signing and verifying XML documents. It also defines an XML timestamp format and an XML signature property for use with the protocols.

Other digital signature efforts are underway by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force – www.ietf.org ) and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium – www.w3c.org ).