The ABA digital signature guidelines are a set of guidelines published on 1 August 1996 by the

American Bar Association The American Bar Association (ABA) is a voluntary association, voluntary bar association of lawyers and law students in the United States; national in scope, it is not specific to any single jurisdiction. Founded in 1878, the ABA's stated acti ...

(ABA) Section of Science and Technology Law. The authors are members of the Section's Information Security Committee.

Overview

The document was the first overview of principles and a framework for the use of digital signatures and

authentication Authentication (from ''authentikos'', "real, genuine", from αὐθέντης ''authentes'', "author") is the act of proving an Logical assertion, assertion, such as the Digital identity, identity of a computer system user. In contrast with iden ...

in electronic commerce from a legal viewpoint, including technologies such as

certificate authorities In cryptography, a certificate authority or certification authority (CA) is an entity that stores, signs, and issues digital certificates. A digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate. Thi ...

and

public key infrastructure A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a set of roles, policies, hardware, software and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store and revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption. The purpose of a PKI is to fac ...

(PKI). The guidelines were a product of a four-year collaboration by 70

lawyer A lawyer is a person who is qualified to offer advice about the law, draft legal documents, or represent individuals in legal matters. The exact nature of a lawyer's work varies depending on the legal jurisdiction and the legal system, as w ...

s and technical experts from a dozen countries, and have been adopted as the model for legislation by some states in the US, including

Florida Florida ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders the Gulf of Mexico to the west, Alabama to the northwest, Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia to the north, the Atlantic ...

and

Utah Utah is a landlocked state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is one of the Four Corners states, sharing a border with Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. It also borders Wyoming to the northea ...

. The Digital Signature Guidelines were followed by the Public Key Infrastructure Assessment Guidelines published by the ABA in 2003. A similar effort was undertaken in Slovenia by the Digital Signature Working Group (within the

Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia The Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia (; acronym: ) is a non-governmental organisation representing the interests of the Slovenian economy. It has the function of an informational body in the sense of economic and business services and ...

(CCIS)).

References

External links

American Bar Association
American Bar Association Cryptography standards Works about computer law Standards of the United States {{crypto-stub