Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
graphic signatures, but expressed some doubts that “the ordinary tasks of
everyday life would accommodate its complexity.”
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Global Signatures
The French jurists were not alone in attempting to update their antiquated
evidential systems. In the late 1990s, in the span of a few short years,
dozens of countries, from Estonia to Tunisia, from Singapore to the United
States, adopted laws mandating courts to admit electronic signatures as
evidence. Historical precedent suggests that such reform should have pro-
ceeded slowly: ancient, often arcane, rules for framing the admissibility
and adjudication of written evidence would have to be rewritten; new
formulations for long-standing concepts of originals, authentic copies,
signatures, and records would have to be devised. However, the explosion
of the New Economy in the mid-1990s insured that all over the world,
governments lent a much readier ear to calls for adapting their legislation
in order to ensure the most favorable environment for the blossoming of
e-commerce.
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A broad range of institutions—professional, state, national, interna-
tional, and supranational—worked at producing the new concepts and
strategies needed to foster the legislative adoption of digital signatures.
Among others, the United Nations Commission on International Trade
Law, the American Bar Association, and the European Union produced
policies, guidelines, and legislation, documents extensively shared and
discussed among the small of community of experts that worked on the
issue. As these institutions attempted to design a workable framework for
electronic evidence, the cryptographic signature model offered itself as a
particularly comprehensive conceptualization of the issue, complete with
extensive mathematical analysis, patents, standards, business models, and
working implementations. The question of how to take advantage of the
maturity of this particular solution while developing concepts and legisla-
tion that would stand the test of time presented itself over and over, as
the following brief overview demonstrates.
United Nations Commission on International Trade Law
The mandate of the United Nations Commission on International Trade
Law (UNCITRAL) is the promotion of “the harmonization and unification
