Application for digital signature and generation of certificates using the Bouncy Castle API considering digital signature law in El Salvador
Álvaro Zavala · 2018
Considering that in El Salvador the digital signature law was approved just over two years ago in order to grant it the same legal power as the handwritten signature, the application developed with the Bouncy Castle API was created to help and facilitate the process of sign and verify documents, and generate certificates to provide services of authentication, data integrity and non-repudiation. The application is divided in two parts, the first, a desktop software built in Java Swing to generate the private-public key pair and uses the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), due to smaller keys needed, and the hash function SHA3 for digital fingerprint, the second is, a web application in JSP for generating digital certificates that simulates the tasks of a Certification Authority (CA) as a certificate provider, where users can request them and these are sent to the applicant's mail, the root certificate auto-signed as part of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is used to sign the certificates generated to other users. A CA provides its certification services that guarantees to third parties, which trust their certificates, the relationship between a user's identity and his public key.