Enhancing the Modularity and Applicability of Web-Based Signature-Verification Tools

Abstract

Electronic signature are an important concept and crucial tool for security-critical applications. Employing the full potential of electronic signatures requires the availability of appropriate signature-verification tools. Today, a plethora of different signature-verification tools exist that allow users to verify electronically signed files and documents. Unfortunately, most of these tools have been designed for a special use case and lack support for various fields of application. This renders the development of applications based on electronic signatures difficult and reduces usability for end users. To overcome this issue, we propose an improved architecture for signature-verification tools. This architecture ensures flexibility and an easy extensibility by following a plug-in-based approach. The applicability and practicability of the proposed architecture has been assessed by means of a concrete implementation. This implementation demonstrates the proposed architecture’s capability to meet requirements of various different application scenarios and use cases. This way, the proposed architecture and the developed implementation that relies on this architecture contribute to the security, usability, and efficiency of present and future electronic signature-based applications.