International audienceA legal basis for the use of electronic signatures exists since the introduction of qualified electronic signatures in EU Directive 1999/ 93/EC. Although considered as key enablers for e-Government and e-Commerce, qualified electronic signatures are still not widely used. Introducing amobile component addresses most of the shortcomings of existing qualified signature approaches but poses certain difficulties in the security reasoning. The proposed server based mobile signature approach authenticates the signatory over trusted channels and assists the protection of the signature-creation data with organizational measures. As with traditional qualified signature approaches, strong authentication of the signatory to the system is ensured by two factors. Knowledge of a PIN and possession of a valid subscriber identity module card is verified over two separate communication channels. The qualified mobil server signature fulfills the requirements on secure signature-creation devices defined by the EU directive and in particular its Austrian implementatio
Qualified electronic signatures are recognized as being equivalent to handwritten signatures and are supported by EU legislation. They require a secure signature creation device (SSCD) such as a smart card. Unfortunately, there are neither standard means for the integration of SSCDs with Web applications, nor are the exiting means widely deployed. Web application providers are still faced with a lack of deployment of such means and a lack of integration with standard software. This paper will present a novel approach to address these issues by a middleware that does not require users to install dedicated software for the creation of qualified electronic signatures. The middleware is deployed as a web application and splits the signature creation process into two parts: One part is performed on the server side and the other part (requiring access to functions of the secure signature creation device) is deployed and executed as a lightweight component in the user's browser on demand.
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