eSealing provides the legal validity, security, and workflow efficiency needed to process documents at the speed and scale of digital business. Transitioning from wet ink signing to eSealing enables significant cost savings, fraud prevention, and compliance with digital signature regulations.
More companies accept and require digital signatures on various business documents, ensuring continued growth and adoption. Pre-emptively implementing eSealing solutions helps companies readily adapt to the expanding digitalization of workflows.
Standard documents that benefit from authenticated protection via eSeals include:
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Purchase orders
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Invoices
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Sales contracts
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Employee onboarding forms
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Medical records
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Banking documents
With eSealing, these high-volume documents can be rapidly, digitally signed to prevent threats like fake invoice scams and fraudulent change order requests that have cost organizations millions.
How Does an eSeal Enhance Document Security?
eSealing enables bulk, automated digital signing on behalf of an organization. With one certificate issued to the company, multiple authorized users can seal documents with the organization’s authenticated identity. eSealing can also be integrated into automated processes, allowing the sealing of numerous documents without manual signature application.
The protection digital signatures provide had previously been used almost exclusively for manual, full contract workflows. Automated eSealing extends that protection against unauthorized changes and the embedding of the signer’s digital identity to documents that are also vulnerable to fraud but issued in high volumes making manual digital signing impractical.
One of the key benefits of eSealing is that it can be automated without the need for manual signature application. This means that high volumes of documents can be digitally signed and sealed quickly and efficiently, without the need for individual signers to manually apply their signatures to each document.
For C-levels and other designated staff at your company, eSealing certificates are provided with cloud-based signing platforms such as eSigner.com. The account administrator can issue credentials to multiple authorized employee representatives, allowing them to share access to the same organizational eSealing certificate. This enables improved coordination and logistics in high-volume document processing.
Through the use of a signing operation API, automated eSealing can be integrated into other document workflows and accounting systems including Adobe Acrobat Sign.
How eSeals Securely Bind Documents
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) provides the underlying framework for eSealing certificates. Compliance standards for certificates and digital signatures are set by Adobe and other certificate authority standards bodies. Certificate authorities are then audited against these standards to be included in the trust stores of Adobe and other document companies.
First, a validation team at a publicly trusted and audited certificate authority like SSL.com validates the company’s identity. Next, through a document signing digital certificate, based on the X.509 standards, a unique cryptographic key pair is bound to the organization’s identity.
Once the certificate is issued, an organization can digitally sign documents using their company’s cryptographic private/public key pair associated with their X.509 certificates. This binds the organization’s authenticated identity to the documents. Signatures are created by hashing a document’s contents to generate unique digital fingerprints, encrypting the hashes with the private key. Upon receipt, signatures are validated with the public key, while the X.509 certificates confirm the identity. This cryptographic process provides tamper evidence and prevents forgeries, improving on ink signatures.
Adobe Trust and eSeals
Adobe PDF readers verify the authenticity of digitally signed documents when the issuing certificate authority is included in Adobe’s Approved Trust List or AATL. An eSeal is only trusted when applied by a certificate issued by a certificate authority included in the AATL. In fact, these digital signatures are sometimes referred to as “AATL signatures.” When a document is signed using an eSeal certificate from a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) like SSL.com, Adobe PDF Readers display a green check mark indicating that the document’s signature is valid and the signer’s identity has been verified by an Adobe-trusted certificate authority.
This Adobe’s trust store verification further enhances the security and reliability of eSealed documents, providing recipients with visual confirmation of the document’s authenticity.
However, to ensure that eSealed documents are legally binding and enforceable, they must also comply with relevant legal and regulatory requirements, which vary by industry and region.
In many industries and regions, electronic documents and digital signatures must comply with specific legal and regulatory requirements to be considered valid and enforceable. Some key compliance standards and regulations related to eSealing include:
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eIDAS (Electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services): The EU regulation provides a framework for electronic identification, authentication, and trust services, including digital signatures. eSeals that meet the requirements of eIDAS are considered legally binding within the EU.
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ESIGN Act (Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act): This U.S. federal law grants legal recognition to electronic signatures and records, provided they meet certain requirements. eSeals can help organizations comply with the ESIGN Act by providing secure, authenticated digital signatures.
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UETA (Uniform Electronic Transactions Act): Adopted by most U.S. states, UETA establishes the legal equivalence of electronic records and signatures to paper-based counterparts. eSeals can facilitate compliance with UETA by enabling secure, verifiable digital signatures on electronic documents.
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ISO 32000: This international standard specifies the PDF file format, including requirements for digital signatures. eSeals that adhere to ISO 32000 ensure compatibility and interoperability across different platforms and software.
By implementing eSealing solutions that comply with relevant regulations and standards, organizations can ensure that their digitally signed documents are legally valid and enforceable, facilitating secure and efficient electronic transactions.
Use Cases Best Suited for eSeal
Standard high-volume use cases well suited for transitioning from inefficient wet ink signing to streamlined eSeal workflows include:
- Accounting and billing
- Sales contracting and agreements
- Onboarding agreements
- Document archiving
- Securing online form submissions
In regulated industries, eSeals also provides compliance benefits to satisfy official demands for valid digital signatures:
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Healthcare
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Document management and storage
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Banking
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Government
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Engineering & Manufacturing
How Can You Get eSealing?
Existing SSL.com certificate customers should contact support to convert organization certificates to eSealing to remove the requirement that a one-time password (OTP) be provided through an authenticator for each digital signature application. Those with use cases needing new implementation of eSeal-enabled Organization Validation (OV) certificates can contact the SSL.com support team at
Future-Proof Workflows with the Efficiency of eSeals
eSeals provide the upgraded legal protections and workflow efficiency gains businesses need to accelerate secure document processing.
When an organization requires a high-volume of sensitive documents to be protected against fraud, eSeals future-proof businesses for a modern cybersecurity and electronic fraud threat environment.
