A Practical Approach to expressing digitally signed documents

Initially developed and considered for providing authentication and integrity functions, digital signatures are studied nowadays in relation to electronic documents (edocs) so that they can be considered equivalent to handwritten signatures applied on paper documents. Nevertheless, a standardized format to be used specifically for e-doc representation was not yet specified. Each document management system is free to choose whatever e-doc format is suitable for its requirements (e.g. ASCII, Word, PDF, binary). So far, some solutions for document management systems were found but none of them was designed to consider security an important requirement and to enable digital signing and easy management of e-docs. A possible solution to this problem is our secure document management system named AIDA. This paper focuses on the use of XML and XML Signature for the representation of e-docs in AIDA.