> when we were called into help word-smith the cal. state and later the > fed. electronic signature law ... a lot of effort went into making the > wording technology agnostic as well as trying to avoid confusing > authentication and identification.
We've been discussing those very same topics within Europe for many years now. When some EU Member States (Germany, Austria, ...) already had very stringent signature laws the EU was kind of forced to act. They tried to enact a signature directive which they thought would be as technology neutral as possible. And although that approach seemed to be a good one they failed: they were overambitious wrt certain issues, what's more the implementation of the directive into national legislation lead to 20+ different EU signature laws: http://www.pki-page.info/eu/ In 2003 we wrote a report for the European Commission, trying to compare the situation throughout the Member States as well as focussing on practical applications: http://www.law.kuleuven.ac.be/icri/itl/elsig.php http://www.secorvo.de/publikationen/electronic-sig-report.pdf Cheers, Stefan. ------------------------------------------------------- Stefan Kelm Security Consultant Secorvo Security Consulting GmbH Ettlinger Straße 12-14, D-76137 Karlsruhe Tel. +49 721 255171-304, Fax +49 721 255171-100 [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.secorvo.de/ ------------------------------------------------------- PGP Fingerprint 87AE E858 CCBC C3A2 E633 D139 B0D9 212B --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]