When we talk about electronic signatures, very often the question arises for some important documents, not just to confirm its authenticity and validity by signature, but also to notarize the fact of signing the document itself. Such a fact is usually registered by notaries, but what to do if all data exchange is electronic?
You should understand that notaries are not always needed, but only when additional protection is needed. When it is necessary to fix a specific time for signing a transaction and, if necessary, involve a third party, which was an additional guarantor of the transaction. That is why for all users of our infrastructure we give such an additional feature — any user can not only sign documents, but also fix the fact of signing these documents with the help of blockchain. The second important functionality that we have implemented in the idnnty infrastructure is signing and notarizing data, which can be exchanged not only by people, but also by corporations electronically.
eSigning and notarizing documents using blockchain
Every batch of documents that users exchange and sign with their e-signatures they can do without a notary. For example, a signed document package can be emailed with a metadata attached that contains information about the outcome of the signing.
But there are situations, especially when two participants are in different jurisdictions, that one of the users has to sign documents with a specialized private key that has been issued by a special authority in order for those documents to be considered legally significant for his jurisdiction. We have provided that in this case, such a set of documents can be additionally signed by another signature and the whole set of documents can be notarized using blockchain.
In this case the files are selected, from which the hash is then created, after which this data is signed as personal keys of each user and additionally the user can sign this package with other electronic signatures as he sees fit.
After all this data is stored as a transaction in our infrastructure and notarized — i.e. the timestamp with all the document metadata and digital signatures is specified as well. By the way, if it is necessary — for such a notary, an additional party can also be involved as a guarantor to fix this transaction with its private key.
Legally meaningful data exchange between information systems
This is the second very important case that we implemented in our infrastructure. Very often there is a need to exchange data between corporations. Of course, each company can download data from the corporate system(ERP or any else), make a report or something else, sign it, and send it to the other company. The second company, in turn, must take this data, somehow transfer it to their information system, generate a new document and send it back signed. When such data exchange does not happen often — there are no problems, companies regularly exchange data — there are a lot of problems.
Of course the concept of electronic data interchange is not new, there are a lot of ready-made systems in the world that allow to integrate information systems of corporations with each other to automate this exchange, here are just a few of the most well known:
- SWIFT — The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, legally S.W.I.F.T. SC, is a Belgian cooperative society providing services related to the execution of financial transactions and payments between banks worldwide
- Edisoft — platform for digital transformation and data exchange in the supply chain
Usually, all these standards and buses are centralized and impose certain restrictions on message formats, which is not always convenient to implement in corporations and requires significant adaptation of internal processes. Moreover, there are a lot of cases that are not yet covered by existing solutions:
- Data exchange between contractors and sub-contractors in the performance of works — plan vs. fact
- Data exchange between resource companies and local regulators
- Exchange of legally significant messages between corporations — document flow integration
- And a whole lot more
It is for this purpose that we have made it possible to create, encrypt and transfer data directly between information systems using the idntty infrastructure. At the same time, when creating a transaction with information, each of the companies automatically signs this transaction with its private key and notarizes it, storing this transaction in the blockchain network. In this way, automatically encrypted data can be stored and transmitted to another company, which in turn can read and decrypt it for automatic processing in its information system.
Similar to documents, data that is notarized using the public blockchain network can be signed not only with keys validated for signing transactions in the idntty infrastructure, but also with third-party private keys that the company uses.
Thus, we have created a maximally flexible infrastructure not only for identification but also for validation of information exchange between participants — no matter what it is — existing documents in the form of files or data that can be exchanged between corporations by integrating information systems.
