7.1 Introduction

Creating, distributing and storing documents electronically has been providing greater convenience, higher speeds and increased economy for businesses and people since the advent of the personal computer. Electronic documents can be created more easily than their paper-based equivalents, transmitted around relevant parties quickly, and can be modified easily. Furthermore, electronic documents can be stored and backed up at a fraction of the cost and space of physical ones. However, one drawback has been that they have been a little too easy to copy or edit. There was no way to tell original electronic documentation from a copy, or who created it, or even whether it had been altered. This made the system rather unsuitable for auditable records, such as financial details, contracts, etc. Powerful mathematical techniques, based on cryptography, provided a solution to this, by providing protection and evidence of who created what, and whether anything had been altered. However, it is only recently that legislation has caught up with technology.

In the UK, the Electronic Communications Act 2000 enacted most of the provisions of the European Directive 1999/93/EC on a European Community framework for electronic signatures [1], so that an electronic document can be signed electronically (e.g. using a cryptographic digital signature) to bind signatories to the content they sign, with the same legal effect as if they used a traditional signature [2]. Other member states either have passed, or are in the process of passing, similar legislative measures. Wisely, the technology used is not...