Understanding eIDAS and Its Impact to Your Business

Summary: Businesses face many regulations and standards, suggested or imposed, and complying with them can be difficult. In this blog, we’ll look at eIDAS, its potential impact on your business, and how Apryse can help you manage the digital signature compliance process by using the Apryse Digital Signatures SDK.

Businesses operating online in today’s world face a seemingly endless number of hurdles, many of which are caused by various suggested or imposed regulations and standards. Complying with these regulations and standards can be confusing and tedious but also necessary to reduce legal risks, protect sensitive information, and build trust among businesses and consumers.

In this blog, we’ll look at the Electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services, or eIDAS, regulation, what it is, and how it could impact your business. We’ll also explore the benefits of using the Apryse Digital Signatures SDK to ensure your apps comply with the eIDAS digital signatures standards.

The eIDAS regulation was designed to provide a safe way for users to conduct business online with public services within the European Union by providing a consistent legal framework for accepting electronic identities and signatures.

While the regulation covers many aspects related to electronic transactions, such as electronic signatures, digital identity, qualified digital certificates, qualified website authentication certificates, and more, we’ll focus on digital signature compliance.

Electronic signatures make conducting business easier because they can be done from anywhere, without requiring the signer to be physically present. The eIDAS regulation created standards to govern these signatures and other forms of proof of authentication for electronic transactions. The responsibility to comply with these standards falls on the service providers.

An electronic signature is not the same as a digital signature, even though the terms have been used interchangeably. Let’s look at how they differ:

An electronic signature is a digital representation of a signature and doesn’t usually include any verifiable electronic information. Therefore, there is no real way to verify that the document was not altered after it was signed.

A digital signature can be classified as one of two types:

Check out our Ultimate Guide to Digital Signatures for a more detailed explanation of electronic versus digital signatures.

Now that we’ve covered the types of signatures, we need to understand how to verify a digital signature.

When a digital signature is created, a unique hash or digest value is generated from the document data using a hash function. This hash is then encrypted with the signer's private key to create the signature.

To verify the digital signature, it is decrypted using the signer's public key to retrieve the original hash. A new hash is generated from the document data using the same hash function. If the two hashes match, the data is considered to not have been altered since the document was signed, and so the digital signature is valid.

With a digital signature, you can tell exactly who created or signed the document, and you can safely assume it’s authentic. This also verifies the integrity of the data by knowing that it has not changed from when the document was signed. Also, a signer can’t deny they signed a document since a digital signature identifies exactly who signed it.

Digital signatures and the components used to verify their authenticity have many uses, including:

Risk management: A digital signature verifies who signed a document, including when and how. Signatures can also be removed when changes have been made to the data.

Managing contracts on the go: Digital signature capabilities allow contracts to be securely signed from anywhere, anytime.

The Apryse Digital Signatures SDK has the tools and features to help comply with the eIDAS regulation and other global standards, such as ESIGN and UETA, as signers can use certificate-based digital IDs to authenticate their signature, prevent tampering of documents, and validate signatures.

Key digital signature features

Along with PDF signing capabilities, the Apryse Digital Signatures SDK also allows you to:

We get it. Regulations, standards, and compliance can be confusing, cumbersome and even a bit scary, especially if you are new to it all. We have just looked at eIDAS, its impact, and how digital signature compliance fits in. If you are implementing digital signatures to comply with eIDAS, Apryse has the best-in-class Digital Signatures SDK to help you in your journey.

Experience our digital signature demo for yourself.

Have questions? Contact us to speak with an expert or even reach out on Discord.