Conditional Electronic Signatures for Data and Condition Verification
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current electronic commerce systems lack the ability to specify conditions alongside digital signatures, leading to potential legal uncertainties and lost sales due to the inability to add annotations similar to handwritten conditions, which are crucial in business negotiations.
Innovation Solution
A method for generating conditional electronic signatures by encrypting data items and conditions separately, combining and further encrypting them to produce a digital signature block that verifies both the data and conditions, allowing for cryptographic verification and supporting multiple conditions and recipients with different access levels.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If digital signatures are used to confirm acceptance of agreements, then authentication and identity verification are improved, but the ability to specify conditions alongside the signature is lost
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges the digital signature with conditional statements by encrypting both the data item and the conditions together in a single cryptographic operation. The signature algorithm processes the concatenation of the hashed data item and hashed conditions, creating a unified signature block that binds both elements together. This allows conditions to be specified alongside the signature while maintaining cryptographic verification.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates a composite structure where the signature block contains multiple encrypted components: the encrypted data item, encrypted conditions, and their cryptographic binding. This composite approach allows the signature to simultaneously provide authentication and carry conditional information, resolving the contradiction between reliability and adaptability.
2Reliability
If conditions are encrypted separately from data items, then security and verification capability are improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the encryption process into distinct steps: first hashing the data item separately, then hashing the conditions separately, and finally encrypting the concatenation of both hashes. This segmentation provides clear verification capability for each component while organizing the complexity into manageable, standardized cryptographic operations.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent uses universal cryptographic primitives (hashing and encryption) that serve multiple functions: hashing provides data integrity verification, encryption provides confidentiality, and their combination provides both verification capability and security. This multi-functionality reduces the need for separate specialized mechanisms, thereby managing complexity.
3Adaptability or versatility
If multiple conditions are specified for a signature, then flexibility in business negotiations is improved, but processing complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent processes all conditions together in a single cryptographic operation by concatenating their hashes and encrypting the result. This approach handles any number of conditions uniformly without requiring separate processing for each condition, thereby providing flexibility for multiple conditions while keeping processing complexity manageable through a standardized single-step encryption process.
Data Source
AI summary
Provided are methods, apparatus and computer programs for generating and using conditional electronic signatures enabling the parties to an online communication or transaction to link conditions unambiguously with signed data items, and enabling verification of the authenticity of the data item and conditions and verification of the identity of the signing party. A data item and one or more conditions are separately hashed, the resulting digests (hash values) are concatenated, and the concatenand is further hashed to produce a final digest. The final digest is encrypted using the private key of a public/private key encryption scheme to produce a conditional digital signature. The data item and conditions can each be verified. Verification includes decrypting the conditional signature and comparing the decrypted result with a separately generated final digest. A solution is also disclosed for propagating information to interested parties when a first is countermanded at a second review.