Trust-service status list based signature verification opportunities, implementation and survey

Abstract

Interoperability and cross-border services are on the top of the agenda of the Digital Agenda for Europe and the e-Government action plan. Here, electronic signatures and their verification play a major role. Especially electronic signatures relying on qualified certificates and produced by secure signature creation devices are of special interest - as they are legally equivalent to handwritten signatures. To facilitate the recognition of such qualified signatures, trust-service status lists have been established. Current signature verification applications lack on a sufficient support of trust-service status lists. To solve this problem, we propose an efficient, adaptable and easy to use trust-service status list enabled signature verification application. Our solution bases on the Austrian signature verification component MOA-SP. It extends the existing architecture to support trust-service status list functionalities. Finally, our implementation is evaluated in real life scenarios and we give a survey about the implementation status of trust-service status lists in Europe. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.