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Electronic signatures?

 
Ranch Hand
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I want to know, what are electronic signatures? what is their role in security and how they are normally implemented through software/code? When I am browsing I often see a 'view certificate' kind of pop-up from veri-sign or so at some site, does that have any relation to these?
 
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Google is your friend.
Look at gpg/pgp for example uses.

There are several kinds of electronic signatures. But the most common type uses RSA. This is a crude overview. From wikipedia:

A digital signature scheme typically consists of three algorithms:

* A key generation algorithm that selects a private key uniformly at random from a set of possible private keys. The algorithm outputs the private key and a corresponding public key.
* A signing algorithm which, given a message and a private key, produces a signature.
* A signature verifying algorithm which given a message, public key and a signature, either accepts or rejects.

 
Akhilesh Trivedi
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Thanks Pat, I actually came here after reading wikipedia. However words pgp and gpg were really worth, thanks again.
 
Be reasonable. You can't destroy everything. Where would you sit? How would you read a tiny ad?
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