Signing Fields

Digital signatures are now an accepted means for legally transacting business in today's world. In fact, Congress recently passed a bill allowing digital signatures to be used to consummate a contract. Although this recent press has brought digital signatures into the lexicon of everyday people, they are nothing new to Notes/Domino users. Notes/Domino users have long had the ability to use digital signatures to sign fields when they save or mail sensitive data, which authenticates the identity of the sender and ensures the integrity of the data.

When a field is signed, Notes uses the private key of the author's ID and the value of the field being signed to create a unique value that serves as the digital signature. When the recipient views the document, the same hashing algorithm is used to ensure that the data has not been altered and to test the public key of the sender to verify the user's identity.

Notes makes it very easy to use digital signatures to ensure the validity of a document. Any form that contains at least one field that has the Sign If Mailed or Saved in Section attribute enabled can be signed.

You can enable field signing only on forms that are mail-enabled or contain controlled-access sections.