A digital signature is a cryptographic technique that lets the recipient of an electronic message verify both who sent it and that its contents have not been altered since signing, doing for digital documents what a handwritten signature and a wax seal traditionally did for paper ones. The American cryptographers Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman first described the mathematical concept in their 1976 paper introducing public-key cryptography, proposing that a message encrypted with a sender's private key could be verified by anyone holding the corresponding public key. Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman turned the idea into a practical working method the following year with the RSA algorithm, published in 1977 and 1978, and digital signatures built on RSA and later algorithms now underpin the security of software updates, secure websites and electronically signed contracts worldwide.
Facts
SignificanceRSA provided the first practical means of producing digital signatures, and Lotus Notes 1.0 in 1989 was the first widely marketed software package offering them. 1 FAQs
Did digital signatures exist as soon as the idea was proposed in 1976?
No. The 1976 idea was only conjectured to be possible; RSA soon afterwards gave a first proof of concept.
No. In 1976 Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman described the notion of a digital signature scheme, but they only conjectured that such schemes could exist, based on functions known as trapdoor one-way permutations. Soon afterwards Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman invented the RSA algorithm, which could be used to produce primitive digital signatures, although only as a proof of concept, because plain RSA signatures are not secure.
Connections
Sources
1. Digital signature, Wikipedia
History, first paragraph
In 1976, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman first described the notion of a digital signature scheme, although they only conjectured that such schemes existed based on functions that are trapdoor one-way permutations.
History, Lotus Notes paragraph
The first widely marketed software package to offer digital signature was Lotus Notes 1.0, released in 1989, which used the RSA algorithm.
In Group: Network and Authentication Security Technologies, Lead
A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents.
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