CEF eSignature Presented at ETSI eSignature and eSeal Validation Workshop
Click to see the presentation (PDF)
On 10 January 2018, the European Commission presented on the validation of qualified electronic signature, and its implementation in Digital Signature Service (DSS), the e-signing component provided by the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eSignature Building Block at the 'eSignature and eSeal Validation Workshop' in Sophia Antipolis, France.
The one-day workshop discussed standardisation for eSignature/eSeal Validation services provided by Trust Service Providers, addressing conformity assessment, protocols and validation report. The objective was to define standards adequate to reach the objective of Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market (commonly known as the eIDAS Regulation).
The eIDAS Regulation has applied directly to the EU Member States since 1 July 2016, when it came into full effect, replacing the eSignature Directive of 1999. The new legal framework ensures legal certainty for cross-border use of electronic signatures, e-seals, time-stamps, eDelivery service and website authentication certificates. The main changes introduced by the eIDAS Regulation are:
- A regulation, not a directive, making it directly applicable across Europe without the need for transposition into national legislation
- Paving the way to new remote qualified signature solutions and improved user experience
- A pan-European harmonization of electronic signature
- Electronic documents cannot be denied legal effect solely because they are in electronic form
- Qualified trust services across Europe
- The introduction of electronic seals, available to legal persons, technologically similar to electronic signature and ensuring identity and integrity
- The introduction of time stamping
- The constitutive effect of national Trusted Lists
- A qualified validation service for qualified electronic signatures
The eSignature Building Block helps public administrations and businesses to accelerate the creation and verification of electronic signatures. The deployment of solutions based on this building block in a Member State facilitates the mutual recognition and cross-border interoperability of electronic signatures. This means that public administrations and businesses can trust and use electronic signatures that are valid and structured in EU-interoperable formats.
During the presentation, the European Commission made specific reference to the DSS services provided as part of CEF eSignature.
DSS is an open-source software library for electronic signature creation and validation. It supports the creation and verification of interoperable and secure electronic signatures in line with European legislation.
In particular, it follows the eIDAS Regulation and related standards closely. DSS is re-useable in an IT solution for electronic signatures to ensure that signatures are created and verified in line with European legislation and standards.
To promote recognition of services within the EU, ETSI started working on standardization of electronic signatures/eSeal validation, addressing policy and security requirements fitting within the EU scheme for supervision of (qualified) electronic signatures/eSeal validation services, as well as specifying the technical architecture, the protocol, and the validation report. The work intends to provide standards that will ensure coexistence of various solutions (e.g. protocols bindings).
The standards provided by ETSI aim at supporting not only eIDAS, but also other legal or regulatory frameworks.
See the event agenda and find out more: