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Check out our legality guide to know the legal status of digital signatures in you country/region.

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Security and legality

With businesses slowly transitioning from wet ink signatures to digital signatures, there has been a growing concern regarding security and legality. Signing documents digitally is often misconceived as being open to risks, such as digital interception, phishing, privacy breaches, and document damage or loss. Understanding the legal aspects can also be difficult, especially if the right digital signature solution is not selected.

What is a digital signature?

A digital signature is a secure, unique, and paperless alternative to wet ink signatures that uses cryptographic techniques to ensure the security of a document. Businesses can mitigate risk like digital document tampering, forged signatures, human errors, and impersonation using a secure digital signature solution. There are a number of beneficial features that come along with digital signatures. Audit trails establish the signature time and other important document details. Authentication codes or government IDs help verify the signer's identity. Plus, digitally signed documents can be made valid for long periods of time.

Are digital signatures secure?

Are digital signatures secure?

Digital signatures are absolutely safe and secure. Digital signatures function using a cryptographic technique called public key infrastructure (PKI). When a document is digitally signed, a unique private key is encrypted into the document as a digital signature. The signer sends the encrypted document to the recipient, along with a public key. If the keys match, the file can be decrypted.

Are digital signatures legally valid?

Are digital signatures legally valid?

Digital signatures are legally on par with wet ink signatures in most countries. You can verify the legal status of digital signatures in your region here.

Optimize security and legality with Zoho Sign

 

Security

  • Zoho Sign uses public key infrastructure using AES-256 encryption.
  • In transit, documents comply with TSL/SSL protocols.
  • Data in our servers is encrypted and cannot be read plainly, even by employees.
 

Compliance and certifications

Zoho Sign strictly complies with regional and international data privacy and security regulations, such as:

 

Legality

Zoho Sign's digital signatures abide by national legal guidelines, such as the ESIGN Act in the USA, PIPEDA in Canada, eIDAS in the European Union, and the ITA in India. Check out our legality guide to verify the status of digital signatures in your country.

 

Authentication

Users can opt for signer identity verification, choosing from a range of methods, such as:

  • Regional or national government IDs like Aadhaar, eID, and Singpass
  • SMS OTP
  • Email OTP
  • Offline code
  • Dynamic knowledge-based authentication
 

Audit trails

Zoho Sign allows for document timestamping, which establishes an audit trail that tracks the exact sign time, location, and other signer details. You can also enable blockchain timestamping or long-time validation to ensure that the document validity is accessible on a public blockchain and is verifiable over a longer period of time.

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FAQs on digital signatures

  • Are digital signatures legally valid?

    Yes, digital signatures are legally valid in most countries. You can verify the legality status of digital signatures in your region here.

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