What is a Certificate Authority?
A Certificate Authority (CA) is an entity that issues digital certificates to people and organisations that it has verified.
A CA is a trusted, impartial third party and the custodian of the cryptography used to produce and store the user's private key pair.
For the sake of third-party impartiality, CAs control the issuance of the digital certificates, and through integration, eSignature applications, like SigniFlow, control the signing operation.
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Certificate Authority
Electronic signatures that are applied without a digital certificate have far less legal value than electronic signatures applied by someone that has a digital certificate issued to them by a trusted CA. In essence, when an electronic signature is applied with a digital certificate, it becomes a digital signature, or advanced eSignature.
Read more about the differences between electronic and digital signatures here
CAs issue digital certificates, which are commonly referred to as Advanced Electronic Signatures (AES) or Qualified Electronic Signatures (eIDAS QES).
Although these certificates are by name "electronic signatures", it is not easy to sign a document using just the digital certificate, and it becomes very complicated if the document needs to be signed by multiple parties.
Therefore, eSignature workflow applications like SigniFlow are enabled to securely access the digital certificate when applying a signature. The signatures, audit logs and timestamps are embedded by the eSign software using cryptography standards that comply with legal requirements for AES and QES
CA Integration
SigniFlow eSignature document workflow software is certificate agnostic, meaning that it can be used with almost any digital certificate, issued by any CA or government root CA.
SigniFlow has integrations with multiple CAs and government root CAs across the world, some of which include:
- Sign with Singpass (Singapore) for digital signature
- POS Digicert (Malaysia) for strong login identification, digital signature and eKYC
- Clave Unica (Chile - Citizens) for digital signature
- Segpres (Chile - Government) for digital signature
- ICP Brazil (Brazil) for digital signature (USB token, integration)
- InFile (Guatamala) for digital signature
- TrustPro (EU eIDAS Qualified) for Qualified Electronic Signature
- GlobalSign (EU eIDAS Qualified) for Qualified Electronic Signature
- GlobalSign (Global AATL) for digital signature and digital signing service (DSS)
- GlobalSign (Asia Pacific AATL) for Advanced Electronic Signature
- EvroTrust (EU eIDAS Qualilfied) for Electronic Signature
For a more comprehensive list of global CAs, or to find a local CA in your country, please contact us.
EvroTrust partnership
Powerful new alliance gives businesses compliance certainty
SigniFlow proudly announces our new partnership with Qualified Trust Service Provider (QTSP) Evrotrust, which will enable our users to comply at the highest levels with eIDAS regulations.
The partnership, forged in the wake of stringent compliance requirements, follows the significant uptake in eSign solutions to enable remote business transacting, in the UK and across the world.
SigniFlow’s partnership with Evrotrust is steeped in eIDAS Regulation. This means that, with the power of Evrotrust qualified electronic signatures behind our solution, our users have the highest degree of confidence when it comes to eIDAS compliance.
Sign with your own certificate
SigniFlow's Certificate Manager is an application for users who have their own certificate on a secure signing key.
This is available to all of our users for free under our Bring Your Own Certificate campaign.
Simply download the application, set up your certificate within SigniFlow, and get signing.
Certifications
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