Several weeks ago Congress passed the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, giving electronic signatures the same legitimacy as actual signatures, and insuring virtual transactions using these cryptic identifiers now will be legally binding.
Once President Clinton signs it into law-which is expected to occur this week-electronic and/or digital signatures will allow consumers and businesses to enter contractual agreements via remote or wireless devices using the Internet.
The law-set to take effect Oct. 1-also is expected to speed up the evolution of electronic commerce by giving both consumers and businesses a recourse of action should an electronic transaction come into question, according to Stuart Noyce, vice president of marketing for Certicom Corp., a provider of security solutions for wireless devices.
“It should allow people to feel more comfortable using electronic signature technology,” Noyce said.
When a person conducts a transaction over the Internet, he or she has a private “key,” or numerical identifier, that other computers can read. These keys act as a person’s digital signature.
Certicom said it uses an elliptic curve cryptosystem, a power-efficient security technology well-suited for low-power devices such as cellular phones. ECC creates a key by generating a random number and computing the multiple of a point. RSA, a more widely used security encryption technology, uses prime numbers and requires primality testing, which can sap computer resources.
Noyce said now that electronic signatures soon will be legally binding, this opens the doors for a variety of business-to-business transactions such as licensing a car or finalizing a mortgage agreement.
Because businesses were not guaranteed until now the legality of electronic transactions, these applications were only concepts. Now, however, “it’s time for businesses to start selling to customers,” Noyce said.
“We have not seen widespread use of authentication up until now,” said Noyce. “We’re going to see B-to-B situations where there are going to be lots of mobile devices tapped into situations like health care.”
As an example, Noyce predicted doctors soon will be using Palm Pilots to virtually sign prescriptions and send them to a pharmacy to be filled.
