Digital signatures and their applications in society, industry and politics are becoming increasingly important. There are a lot of cases in which a digital signature is equivalent to a handwritten signature. Consequently a need arises for tools and methods which qualify and analyse the processes involved in the generation and verification of digital signatures. This paper concerns universally applicable criteria necessary to verify a digital signature. There are technical considerations which are necessary in determining the validity of a digital signature aside from legal aspects and other defined rules. The main topics of this paper are the technical validation of digital signatures and a proposal for a new logic for this purpose. This logic enables the derivation of obvious and consistent conclusions about the validity of a digital signature. The formal derivation is based on the characteristics of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which is described by the symbols defined in the introduction of the logic. It is necessary to define exact validity requirements for the realisation of software which make use of digital signatures. In particular, applications from different vendors have to arrive at the same result when applying common criteria. In most cases these criteria are part of the agreed specifications of the PKI. However, as shown in chapter 6, these specifications can be inconsistent and incomplete. This can be avoided by the additional formal description of the processes involved in the verification. Formal rules enforce a consistent specification and help to avoid logical gaps. In this light, a proposal is made for a new logic in the description of the processes involved in the verification of digital signatures. The Signature-BAN (SigBAN) logic, introduced in this paper, is based on several modifications and extensions to the BAN logic. The BAN logic was developed by Burrows, Abadi and Needham for the analysis of authentication protocols in 1989. Moreover, authentication protocols are based on the same cryptographic principles as digital signatures. The verification of digital signatures, however, differs from the analysis of authentication protocols. For this reason the SigBAN logic is based on completely newly developed axioms. As a result the SigBAN syntax differs from the BAN syntax. After the definition, the SigBAN logic is applied to different examples. Practical use, completeness and the lack of contradictions are shown by the analysis of different PKIs. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the verification processes according to the interoperability specifications of the German signature act (SigG/SigV). Additionally, a proposal to improve the SigG time stamping service is developed with SigBAN syntax. Inconsistencies in the two different SigG validity models are shown by a comparison with SigBAN.
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Digital signatures and their applications in society, industry and politics are becoming increasingly important. There are a lot of cases in which a digital signature is equivalent to a handwritten signature. Consequently a need arises for tools and methods which qualify and analyse the processes involved in the generation and verification of digital signatures. This paper concerns universally applicable criteria necessary to verify a digital signature. There are technical considerations which a...
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