Validate Digital Signatures

When you receive a signed document, you may want to validate its signature(s) to verify the signer and the signed content. Depending on how you have configured your application, validation may occur automatically. Signature validity is determined by checking the authenticity of the signature’s digital ID certificate status and document integrity:

• Authenticity verification confirms that the signer's certificate or its parent certificates exist in the validator’s list of trusted identities. It also confirms whether the signing certificate is valid based on the user's Acrobat or Reader configuration.

• Document integrity verification confirms whether the signed content changed after it was signed. If content changes, document integrity verification confirms whether the content changed in a manner permitted by the signer.

Signatures panel for digital signatures

The Signatures panel displays information about each digital signature in the current document and the change history of the document since the first digital signature. Each digital signature has an icon identifying its verification status. Verification details are listed beneath each signature and can be viewed by expanding the signature. The Signatures panel also provides information about the time the document was signed, and trust and signer details.

In Adobe Acrobat:

1. Choose View > Show/Hide > Navigation Panes > Signatures, or click the Signature Panel button in the document message bar.

Depending on your trust settings Boss Insights may or may not be on your trusted signers list.

To assess the validity of the document

The document has been signed with a cryptographic signature to guard against modification. If the document has not been tampered with you will see the text “Document has not been modified since it was certified” as shown below:

Trusting the certificate

If Boss Insights is not on your trusted signers list you may add it to your trusted identity list in the Trusted Identity Manager and manually set its trust level. End users often exchange certificates as needed when using certificate security. Alternatively, they add certificates directly from signatures in signed documents and then set trust levels.