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these signatures easy to use. Let me spend a few minutes talking about digital signatures,
although I am sure that most of you already know what these signatures are and why they
are important, but let me recap.
Digital signatures is a technology that allows you to seal a document or a transaction,
to lock it in such a way that it is absolutely provable who the person is that signed the
document or made the transaction and it is also possible to prove that this transaction was
not changed since the moment it was signed. By the way, I was a military commander at
one stage in my life, and I sent various electronic commands to various troops in the
field; they received these files or messages but how did they know that the message came
from me, and was not forged by anyone else? How did they know that the message came
from me but was not changed? When I gave a command and someone countered that
command, how did they know the data integrity of the message was maintained? Digital
signatures give you this ability. So they are very useful, but the only snag is, as I
mentioned before, they are very complicated to use.
In order to deploy digital signatures technology today, you have to rely on what is
called PKI (Public Key Infrastructure). As an organisation you have to set up a complete
PKI system to be able to use digital signatures, and when you start looking at what is
involved in setting up a PKI system, you very quickly understand that this is going to be
very complex and very expensive. Now, we at AR have a lot of experience of setting up
digital signature systems. We have a number of pure digital signature systems that we
have set up in a number of places around the world.
My favourite example, although it is certainly not the only one, is a digital signature
system that we have set up in Israel for the Israeli clearing house. In Israel we have about
15 thousand organisations that pay their salaries to their employees through one of our
digital signature systems. At the end of every month, the accounting department prepares
a file that lists all the employees and their salaries. This file is digitally signed by the
organisation, transmitted to the Israeli clearing house; the Israeli clearing house verifies
the signature, verifies the authenticity of the file and deposits the salaries for the various
employees. If you do not use our system, then you have to use a paper system in which
you prepare a piece of paper, sign it by hand, fax it to the Israeli clearing house and then
have a clerk there who one hopes deposits the right salary to the right employee.
The digital signature system has been alive for about six years now. It is a system in
which I was actually one of the developers and it has been very successful over these past
six years. But as the digital system is an inherent part of the application, you have to
have digital signatures in such an application, and this is why it is worth the expense and
the complexity for the Israeli clearing house to deploy such a system. In other instances
digital signatures are very important, very useful and very cost effective, but it is just not
worth the pain of installing them to solve the problem.
I can quote a problem that I am familiar with at first hand. As I mentioned before,
EMC is one of our customers and I visit them frequently. One of the most interesting
things to see at EMC is a phenomenon that actually exists in many large organisations.
EMC invested an awful lot of energy and an awful lot of money in making a lot of its
internal bureaucracy electronic, so you can see the EMC employees logging on to the
internal web site and entering their time sheet, entering requisition forms, expense forms.
Everything is entered electronically and then it is printed and signed by hand. The
employee then goes to his boss who signs the piece of paper by hand; it is then sent
through internal mail, to the internal paperwork and archiving. So you have invested an
awful lot of energy in making the transaction electronic but you end up with paperwork
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