EU Draft Digital Signature Directive

[Brian Gladman]

George Foot <georgefoot@oxted.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>Surely the most urgent consideration should be to change the name from
>"digital signature" to something else which does describe the feature you
are
>promoting.
>
>"Check-of-Origin" or anything else meaningful which will not cause
confusion in lay
>minds with "trust" and "signature" and other terms used indiscriminatedly
when
>in fact they have very different meanings.


I don't see the use of the term 'digital signature' as misleading in this
respect since a normal written signature says nothing about the
trustworthiness of its owner either.  Both types of signature are trying to
place a (hopefully unique) mark on a data item in order to establish an
association with the person who applies the mark.  Trust in the mark
itself - conventional or digital - is quite separate from any trust we might
have in its owner - I imagine that we can trust Sadam Hussein's signature on
a number of documents but this does not encourage me to have any trust in
him as a person.

If there is a problem with this terminology it is that pointed out on this
list by Carl Ellison - namely that digital signatures are bound tightly to
signed data items and only weakly to their owners - not the sort of property
that we expect of signatures.

    Brian