The ABA digital signature guidelines are a set of guidelines published on 1 August 1996 by the

American Bar Association The American Bar Association (ABA) is a voluntary bar association of lawyers and law students, which is not specific to any jurisdiction in the United States. Founded in 1878, the ABA's most important stated activities are the setting of acad ...

(ABA) Section of Science and Technology Law. The authors are members of the Section's Information Security Committee. The document was the first overview of principles and a framework for the use of

digital signature A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature, where the prerequisites are satisfied, gives a recipient very high confidence that the message was created b ...

s and

authentication Authentication (from ''authentikos'', "real, genuine", from αὐθέντης ''authentes'', "author") is the act of proving an assertion, such as the identity of a computer system user. In contrast with identification, the act of indicat ...

in electronic commerce from a legal viewpoint, including technologies such as

certificate authorities In cryptography, a certificate authority or certification authority (CA) is an entity that stores, signs, and issues digital certificates. A digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate. This ...

and

public key infrastructure A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a set of roles, policies, hardware, software and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store and revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption. The purpose of a PKI is to facil ...

(PKI). The guidelines were a product of a four-year collaboration by 70

lawyer A lawyer is a person who practices law. The role of a lawyer varies greatly across different legal jurisdictions. A lawyer can be classified as an advocate, attorney, barrister, canon lawyer, civil law notary, counsel, counselor, solici ...

s and technical experts from a dozen countries, and have been adopted as the model for legislation by some states in the US, including

Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, a ...

and

Utah Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to its ...

. The Digital Signature Guidelines were followed by the Public Key Infrastructure Assessment Guidelines published by the ABA in 2003. A similar effort was undertaken in Slovenia by the Digital Signature Working Group (within the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia (CCIS)).

References

External links

American Bar Association
American Bar Association Cryptography standards Works about computer law Standards of the United States {{crypto-stub