Electronic commerce has been carried out successfully for years without the use of digital signatures (DSs). Hundreds of billions of dollars of commercial transactions are quite adequately handled each year using the 30+-year-old technologies of electronic data interchange (EDI), electronic funds transfer (EFT), and semiprivate communications links called value-added networks (VANs). Why, then, over the past few years have digital signatures been increasingly seen as necessary to digital commerce? And why have digital signatures had such a high profile in the trade press and even the popular press? Digital signatures address a number of issues that have emerged as the E-commerce communications infrastructure has shifted rapidly from the private, semi-secure communications facilities of VANs to the very open, very insecure Internet. The transition from primarily one-on-one contractual transactions between known, trusted parties, and occurring repeatedly over time to many-to-many transactions between strangers that may occur once, never to be repeated, introduces still more issues that digital signatures have the promise to resolve.
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