Carbon Copy Digital Signature Authentication with airSlate SignNow

Integrate digital signature data

Welcome back, and in this lesson, I want to talk about digital signing or digital signatures. This is a process which you need to be familiar with to understand many other areas of IT, such as DNS sec or SSL certificates. If you haven't watched my video on hashing, it's linked in the description, and you should pause this video and go and do that now because it's required knowledge for this video. At this point, though, let's jump in and get started straight away. Now, before I cover how digital signatures work in detail, I want to give you a quick refresher on public key cryptography. With public key cryptography, you generate two keys as part of the pair. We have on the left the private key, and this part is secret and should only ever be known by the owner. Then we have the public key, and this is not secret. In fact, anyone can know it or possess it. It should be public, and ideally, as widely distributed as possible. Now, these keys are related. They're generated as part of one operation. It means that you can take the public key, which, remember, anyone has or anyone can get, and use it to encrypt data which can then only be decrypted by the matching private key. The data can't even be decrypted using the same public key which encrypted it. So it allows you to securely send data to the owner of the private part of a public key. What this architecture also allows is that you can take something and sign it using the private key. And think of this just like encryption, but where anybody who receives the data and has the public key can view the data and verify that the private key part was used to sign it. And this provides a way to evidence that you are in control of the private key used to sign some data. Since the private key is secret and since only you should have it, this provides a way to establish a form of digital identity or digital validation. This signing architecture is important because it forms the foundation of many other IT processes. The process of adding digital signatures to data adds two main benefits when used in conjunction with hashing. It verifies the integrity of the data, that the data you have is what somebody produced. And it verifies the authenticity so that the data that you have is from a specific person. So integrity is what and authenticity is who. Together, it means that you can download some data from Bob and verify that Bob produced the data and that it hasn't been modified. Nobody can falsify data as being from Bob and nobody can alter the data without you being able to tell. Now, a key part of this process is that it's layered on top of normal usage. So if somebody doesn't care about integrity or authenticity, they can access data...