Second Electronic Signature Pilot Exercise

Having established the viability of combining the open source document creation and editing application Open Office with the freely available Certification Authority services provided by CAcert, the next phase of the pilot exercise was to trial the system with University assessment documents.

 

The standard assessment frontsheet used by the Faculty of Applied Design and Engineering at Swansea Met was chosen. It was imported into Open Office Writer and, after some appropriate formatting changes suitable for export as an OpenDocument Text file, the document was digitally signed using the authentication certificate set up in exercise 1. After confirming the validity of the signature, the file was then sent as an email attachment and, on receipt, the file was saved and opened using Open Office.

 

The received document can be seen below, along with images demonstrating that the digital signature was valid and verifiable on receipt. 

 

Assignment frontsheet received file from Tony Toole



Signature Validity Confirmation

Email File Attachment 

The Electronic Signature pilot will now continue with the registration of other stakeholders as authorised signatories and further experimentation with the online sharing of digitally signed documents. The obvious advantage of this strategy is that all stakeholders: staff, students and administrators; can download the document creation software and register as an authenticated signatory at no cost and at whatever location they choose. The system is therefore a very attractive option for use in online distance learning assessment authentication.