This capability is critical for a variety of electronic commerce applications, including payment tools. Concepts Simply Explained Overview Digital signatures are created and verified using cryptography, the branch of applied mathematics concerned with transforming messages into seemingly unintelligible forms and then back again. Digital signatures are created by performing an operation on information such that others can confirm that a holder of a secret performed the operation and that the signed information has not subsequently changed. In a symmetric key system, both the sender and receiver need to be privy to the secret. The novel feature of public key cryptography is that knowledge of the public key used to confirm signatures does not reveal information about the private key itself.
Structured information permits data to be readily read, exchanged, and acted upon by Web agents.
The combination of metadata and digital signature capabilities will aid in building a genuine Web of Trust. During the reassessment, the duration of the XML-Signature Charter was extended until the end of 2000. In November, the Canonical XML specification was advanced to Candidate Recommendation and should reach Recommendation by year's end. IETF process requires the specification to stay at this level for six months. However, we expect to require only 1-2 months to test two independent implementations over all mandatory features.