Long-term Preservation of Digital Signatures: a Need-to-have or a Nice-to-have?
Ştefan-Ciprian Arseni, Emil Bureacă, Mihai Togan · Journal of Military Technology · 2022
Digital signatures are one of the main components that sustain recent digitization efforts made by public and private institutions.Despite their clear advantages, digital signatures have an 'Achilles heel': they cannot be properly validated, thus trusted, after the corresponding validating certificate has expired.To resolve this issue, standardization and legislative actions have been taken for developing an optimal framework for the implementation of services that can enable users to trust a digital signature, by ensuring that its validation can be done even after multiple years.This is what long-term preservation does and in this article we try to emphasize its role in a modern public-key environment.We focus on the regulation and standards perspective and present a comparison of several implementations of long-term preservation solutions that are available on the market.Through this paper we try to show that this nice-to-have functionality, as it is considered by many vendors, should, in fact, become a need-to-have for anyone dealing with creation and management of digital signatures.