The digital signature dilemma

The last ten years have seen an enormous amount of legal, regulatory, and technological activity aimed at designing a proper electronic equivalent to handwritten signatures. One such design, that of cryptology-based (or digital) signatures, has succeeded over other solutions to the point where, in certain legal systems, such as those of the Member States of the European Union, electronic signatures are almost exclusively understood to be based on public-key cryptography. Yet, several archival institutions (including the National Archives of Canada, Australia and the US) have expressed ambivalence at the prospect of preserving digitally signed records. This paper argues that discrepancies between technical, legal and archival responses to the problem of long-term preservation of digitally signed documents are founded on diverging understandings — physical vs. contextual — of electronic authenticity.