No Organization wants its security to be low. That is why cyber and physical security departments generally run a thorough investigation on their service providers and cloud hosting to protect their company against data breaches, phishing, viruses, malware, data loss, and other significant threats.
In order to defend your organization from such threats, you can find a digital signature security checklist, especially for evaluating digital signature services. The checklist is helpful in implementing effective security in your organization.
You must not only look at the security of the service but also how the signers are verified, the audit trail associated with the digital transaction, and the vendor’s approach to document and signature security. You have to focus more on the core issues for ensuring the integrity and verification of digital signatures.
Let’s have a look at the digital signature security checklist.
User Authentication
The first thing that is included in the security checklist for digital signature is user authentication. You must always ensure the signers’ authentication before signing and integrating the authentication with digital signature and record. You must focus on different factors in this aspect, and it is recommended that you consider a solution for supporting multiple authentication methods.
Also, the solution must have the ability to configure different authentication methods in a single and similar transaction. The security solution must offer flexibility for adapting authentication methods to the risk profile of a company along with the automation of each process. The solution must also provide flexible alternatives for implementing in-person signatures such as affidavits and SMS passwords.
Audit Trail of the Signature
The next essential factor in the digital signature security checklist is the audit trail. The audit trail offers extra security for a digital signature. Electronically signed documents that can have independent verification and archive always have an extra layer of security.
The service provider independence is possible only if the security solutions can embed the digital signatures, time stamp, and audit trail directly in the digitally signed document.
Therefore, you must have a portable and self-contained record that can be taken as a piece of evidence. In such a case, you have to look for two specific factors. The first factor offers the ability for independent verification of the document’s authenticity.
The second factor refers to the ability to indexing, retrieving, and storing the digitally signed document in the specific system of record.
Securing the Document Along with Signature
The aspect of e-signature and document security should also be one of the essential factors for digital signature security. The digital signature solution must ensure adequate security at the signature level as well as the document level. The essential aspects that you must look for are highly recommended for safeguarding confidential information.
It would help if you also verified that every signature and document have proper security for digital signature. It would also help if you had a detailed audit trail that shows the date and time of every signature. The audit trail also offers secure embedding in the document and a significant link with every signature.
You should also check for the feature of one-click signature and document verification. The ability of authentication of signed records offline is also essential in this particular aspect. Another essential factor is that the document must remain accessible to all the organizations that are involved in the transaction.
The security solution you choose must also provide the feature to download an authentic copy of the signed record and audit trail.
Audit Trail of the Compliance Programs and Signing Process
You must also keep a check on the audit trail of the signing process for verifying the security of digital signatures. It ensures that the audit trail has the correct IP address, timestamp, and date of all events and others.
The other aspect includes the duration of time for reviewing every document and all the web pages, documents presented, and disclosures.
The audit trail must also represent intent and other included actions taken during the transaction. Finally, you must make sure that the digital signature service provider has authentic compliance programs in place to deal with different cyber threats. The most recommended compliance program is SOC2.
Cloud Security
Always look at the protocols that your digital signature service provider has in place to prevent and identify significant data breaches. It is essential to understand that the service provider’s track record, certifications, security practices, and security audits frequency.
Performing a thorough check around your service provider’s security practices and infrastructure must expose the incident of data loss, past privacy breaches, and other risks associated with it.
You must always verify that the digital signature platform uses reliable encryption technology and stores data within an entirely encrypted database to ensure an encrypted path for all communications. Your service provider should be a partner with top-class service providers that are designed and managed according to the best security practices.
It should also follow frameworks and compliance programs for data protection and security at the data center level. It would help if you always chose a service provider that meets compliance and additional security control requirements at the application layer. This makes sure that the digital signature solution is secure, and the user’s data is protected.
There must also be Global data centers to meet in-country data residency requirements.
Time Stamps
Timestamps are generally associated with verified signatures as a way to display the authentication of a specific document or agreement.
The presence of an authorized timestamp shows that the contents of the file are completely verified at a given time by a particular person and have not changed since then. These timestamps are applied and fetched through an automated process that is usually associated with the electronic signature certification process.
Final Words
The most important rule for digital signature security, among all other rules, generally refers to integrity and association. In this post, you were able to learn about the importance of rules for digital signature security. So, always keep these things in mind before choosing a security solution.
