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Digital signature peer review report

practical strategy for deploying digital signatures and seals in aec processes this is nancy Johnson I'm the editor-in-chief at catalyst magazine I'll be moderating the presentation today want to thank you all for joining us and taking the time out of your busy schedules to be here so let's jump right in today we'll be hearing from John Mark Keough neva vice president of business development at ARX the developers of the cosine technology and one of their customers Brian Hayes who is chief technology officer at agile frameworks just part of brown intertek about his experience using cosine for digital signatures real quickly a couple of housekeeping issues we will be reserving some time at the end of today's presentation for a Q&A so at any time during a presentation please feel free to type your questions into the question panel that you see on the right of your screen and we will get to as many of those as possible after we wrap up the main part of the presentation we will be recording today's event and making it available to you all as well as the slide deck you will receive a email within 24 hours of the presentation that gives you a link to those resources so without further ado I would like to introduce John Marconi from ARX to tell you more about the cosine technology welcome John um thanks Nancy and welcome everyone to our webinar just as a way of background i'm going to give more information on on framing the issues around automating signature processes they'll be less focused on our specific solution but of course you can ask any question you like about the product and also Brian's experience as his company has implemented it and is using it daily so let's let's jump in so what's the problem we know that firms increasingly need to automate their business processes this has to do with eliminating paper bottlenecks and any friction in the information flow due to not having things electronic we're seeing a large shift and we've all seen this large shift with the advent of things like automated workflow and document management and electronic content authoring applications and there is a huge investment going in to see these larger productivity applications but one thing we've observed is the business or the component of the process that has to do with signatures tends to get overlooked so you've made your investment in the workflow or the content management or the content authoring application but when you need a signature what are you doing you're hitting that print button and producing a piece of paper you are rican Taman ating that otherwise automated process with the thing that you just made a large investment to eliminate which is the paper so the point is signatures the signature component of automating your business should not be overlooked because it can unravel or undo your investment that you've made in those larger systems so we want to this is this presentation today is all about stimulating some thought about you know not not overlooking this and why it's important to consider signature automation to have a fully automated process okay and why that well we know wet signatures cost a lot of money they cost in terms of printing and shipping overhead scanning costs pushing paper to a review process takes a longer time than pushing an electronic document through a review process and this results in delays and the delivery of a project or just in the delivery of getting that approval okay it slows everything down and there are a lot of signature dependent documents there are a lot of signature dependent processes more than maybe what most people think about in fact we saw a study from aim two years ago that said in the 389 organizations that aims surveyed fifty percent of all documents printed were printed for no other reason than to collect the signature and that same study also looked at this engineering construction market and found it this is a vertical industry that is very signature intensive that this industry more than just about any other industry has the most to gain by automating their signatures by automating their signature dependent processes fully and here are just a few use cases or examples of how our customers use cosine some of the things they use to sine cosine with and the list is actually a lot longer but just just to give you an example okay so what's the potential of digital signatures if we look at a couple of our customers we look at hatch hatch dessert from a webinar that hatch did last month they estimated the cost of the wet signatures eighty dollars for drawing that's the overhead and all the handling and they have large multipliers of these things meaning 5050 15,000 drawings in one project and they also experience the delays in the friction introduced with paper so there's a huge potential savings here and this is a good example of how the engineering and construction the mining industry exam for example can benefit from signature automation and then Brian can can speak a little later about how broad intertek has seen savings since automating their signature processes some of the data points here are a single process involving signatures once automated can avoid one hundred thousand dollars per year and overhead there's a reduction in the cycle time for that process and delivery of these processes delivery of the tasks goes from weeks two minutes down to minutes when you get rid of that paper so a big potential if if you're using digital signatures to automate your signature dependent processes okay how to go paperless there's unfortunately probably some psychology involved because people are so used to signing with pen and paper but you know your organization has to decide once and for all they want to minimize their paper usage not just go through the motions but this is this is a an intentional step these are all intentional steps that you have to take from a corporate culture point of view you you need to decide you're going to eliminate paper is a critical process component it should not be relied upon paper in many ways is less reliable in terms of integrity than a proper digital signature on an electronic document you to actually get more light reliability in terms of integrity and knowing that that was the signatory on the document if you're using a digital signature and then you also get these these other products these other benefits where you're eliminating overhead you're keeping your processes electronic and this is all a result of deployment that standard digital signature capability okay so that is how do you address these anxieties or the psychology going paperless well if it has to do with education advocacy and exposure letting actually you know informing your employees your users that there's a better way and you have to promote it and you have to let your users try it I mean one thing we've experienced is once our customers start using cosine you would have to actually fight them to take it away it becomes something that the users like to use the users get satisfaction out of the users understand and you get good user adoption so what I guess what I'm trying to convey here is that the deployment of cosine is a quick win for everybody because the users tend to accept it quickly and start using it they they quickly it because of that exposure get over their fears and discomfort with this component of automation and it gets them off their addiction to paper helps wean them off of it quicker and that you get to mark it as a success to 90 investment that you will get an immediate and measurable return on it's clearly measurable because you can count the number of documents that get signed you can count the number of pages of paper they printed or the FedEx or UPS envelopes they get moved from place to place these are all very clear metrics that everybody from the CFO on down can observe an improvement in your bottom line and if your bottom line is improving and you're doing things faster and more efficiently you're your top line will improve as well you'll be more competitive you'll be able to respond to your customers faster you'll be more agile to you know serve your customer when you know a change order is introduced um think things just happen faster and with a digital signature you can you can still have the control and integrity you need so what I'm about to describe here with us with this primer is how that this standard digital signature mechanism works okay it's something that the user doesn't see something that the user never feels but i present it so that people can get a feel for what is behind this mechanism the standard digital signature mechanism that is so reliable that that you know that you know should make it easier for you to get over your fear of using or automating with digital signatures as it's it's a very robust and and well reviewed technology so the way it works is your user will open a document that they would like to sign they may fill in some information they may just review it they went when it comes time to sign they'll click a sign icon or sign button and the first thing that happens is the document is passed through a special cryptographic algorithm called a hash algorithm and this is based on the secure hash standard for a missed this is phipps 180 dash three well-known well peer-reviewed open standard and what the hash does is it produces a unique digital fingerprint of the document no two documents will ever have the same fingerprint or hash value fact that this is so refined you could view it as the digital DNA of the document okay and it's it's hypersensitive to change detection the hash is what what is used as the main integrity component of the digital signature to ensure that any tampering with a document can be detected if it happened so what I mean by it being sensitive is if I take a document and I hash it I will get a specific hash value a definite digital fingerprint of that document okay represented by 256 bits or ones and zeros okay if I take the same document and I change just one character a very small tamper I change a lowercase a to an upper k day and I rehash that document several bits and the resolving hash are going to flip in value okay it's not the same document and the hash confirmed it something's changed it's a different digital fingerprint it's a different digital DNA okay so that's that's the hash component of the digital signature the other components involves the signature credentials of the signatory the person making the signature has a set of signature credentials made up of a key pair and an ID certificate part of that key pair is a private key this is a large trivalent 2048-bit integer that is unique to that signer to that user no two signers will ever have the same private key value okay that's impossible and therefore you should continuing on that analogy of DNA think of the private key as the digital DNA of the signer okay and the way the signature is made is we take the private key of the signer and we calculate a cryptographic operation over the hash of the document and the result is the digital signature think of it as an encrypted hash of the document okay and that encrypted hash has contribution a unique contribution from the document which is the hash value or the DNA of the document and it has a unique contribution from the finer it has the signers private key was involved so that the signer has also contributed some of its digital DNA so think of the digital signature as a child that's unique to do parents one parent viewing that specific document and that specific signer okay so it creates the digital signature process creates a very strong binding between document and signer and when you find something this way you cannot later deny that's your signature okay very strong binding between that specific document that specific signer the next step is we take the certificate of the signer which it's an identity certificate it contains the identity of the signer and the corresponding public key of the signer which is used to verify the signature and we put that into a signature block and then that is embedded as the digital signature at the metadata level into the document and then any attempt to tamper with either the signature or the document will invalidate the digital signature so won't be relied upon shouldn't be real up relied upon if it's been tampered with if the signature is valid it does verify you can rely on it okay so keep in mind everything that I just described happens in a second the end user doesn't feel at the end user doesn't get involved with it but it's a very robust standard for for digital or signature automation or digital signatures so what's what's the benefit of using standards in this case digital signatures are superior to proprietary techniques because the standards on which they're based have been thoroughly and openly vetted and peer-reviewed this is the primary difference between a standard digital signature and a proprietary electronic signature the standards have been properly vetted and every year are reviewed to make sure they're still robust and they're endorsed openly across the industry when you look at a proprietary technique or you consider a proprietary technique keep in mind that proprietary techniques are not openly peer-reviewed and across the board all of them are to forgery or other attacks not so with a standard digital signature and then standards also prevent vendor lock-in or vendor gridlock meaning if you sign a document today with say for example cosine and you sign a PDF and you send that document outside your organization any number of PDF readers from Adobe from nitro PDF from Fox it to nuance can all recognize and verify the cosine signature on that document without any connection to the cosine system so this prevents vendor what we call vendor gridlock meaning you can sign your document today send it outside your organization the person receiving it can inspect and verify the signature with a free piece of software and it keeps your business moving along you don't have to wait for everybody you're working with to also biosign to verify your signature okay so this is another benefit of interoperability and standard digital signatures are all already supported like I said in addition to Adobe Reader you have nitro PDF you have boxes you have any number of others like nuance autodesk autocad bentley microstation Microsoft Word Excel Outlook any number of applications and workflow platforms support this standard so when you're when you're considering automating your signature processes what should you consider in the digital signature solution well the digital signature should maintain document integrity and you get that the as a default property in the standard that's the secure hash standard is there the hash value it's the solution should be compatible with your content authoring applications meaning it's not enough just to apply the digital signature standard but you need to make sure the solution applies it in a way that the native application can then recognize and verify that signature and you know out of the box for example cosine applies a compatible signature that's recognizable by Adobe by foxit by nitro by nuance by autodesk by Bentley buy corel by lotus by microsoft word excel infopath outlook by staroffice OpenOffice many web applications and so on so when you invest in cosine you're getting a universal digital signature capability that allows you to work in a specific document context that you're used to working and you're out buying a solution that only works with PDF or only works with word for example okay the signature should bind the signatory to the document and seal the document for tamper detection and again this is something that that you get with cosine something that is inherent in the digital signature standard if it's implemented properly okay your your signature solution should be compatible with your governing policies for example for managing your users and authenticating your users this is something else that you get inherently in cosine when you install cosine cosine is driven by your user management system the one that you've currently installed for both driving the signature policy and driving when to grant somebody's signature privilege or when to revoke the signature privilege so cosine out of the box works with things like Active Directory IBM Tivoli Oracle oh I do ed anything that cell death enabled so you don't have to retrofit your infrastructure for user management or user authentication cosine will key off of those policies procedures and systems that you've already invested in and have established and then finally your your solution should allow you control over signature privilege when to issue those credentials for signing when to revoke them and this is something else you get with cosine when when you add a user to your directory cosine is listening and will immediately issue signature credentials for that user likewise when a user loses signing privilege all you need to do is remove them from your directory cosine of still listening and will immediately delete the private key and revoke the identity certificate for that signer so this is a very refined control over signature privilege management and also allows you to rapidly issue signature privileges but also when somebody loses signing privilege you have a tight control over ensuring that they can't make even one more signature after they've after they've been revoked okay so let me show you a couple of quick demos of digital signatures in action I'll start with a simple word document I will this is somebody asking for vacation request Stella right mouse click and click Sign I'll get a preview of of my visible signature and I can choose from any number i can choose when it's a different ink color i can use choose one with my company logo behind it i can just choose my initials if I like so I have any number of appearances of the graphics signature that I could use if I wanted to and then I'll click the sign button I will be prompted with an identity challenge give me your username and password if I answer that correctly what has now happened in the background in a second is this document with and my specific signature credentials my private key and certificate were employed in making my unique digital signature on this document okay so everything i described in that process before just have had been happened NSN sub-second speed and if i right mouse click on this and I want to see what's behind the signature and this is a you know in Word Microsoft Word will show me the details of the signature who signed the document when they signed it and will also show me the identity certificate who was issued to who was issued by and its validity period so the identity and the integrity of the document now is expressed in the form of this digital signature okay if I'm in a workflow and I need a second signature in this document I simply pass it to the next person in this case I'll pretend to be my manager and they'll say okay have a nice trip he'll add some comment here and then he can also sign so in this case L I'll sign with a logo in the background even though I'm the same person in this case I'll answer the identity challenge and now I've signed this document again now you may have noticed something here I've changed the document I've added some text but this signature up here is still valid while why is that well if I right mouse click and I say this show me the signed area I can see that the first signature the scope of the document it applied to was just the first section of the document and since nothing in the first section change that first signature is still valid because it only applied to this part of the document now if I do change something in this part of the document I'll change this 18 to a 19 we can quickly see Microsoft will no longer say these signatures are valid somebody's tampered with this document don't rely on it okay and there are other features here for example if I want to be clever and i say i'm going to i'm going to print this document with the green check marks i'll change the 18 to the 19 and it will come up here and hit the print button what will happen is the integrity check before the document is sent to the printer is recalculated and what will print our red X is not green check marks okay so simple demo and word let's look at one in PDF here i have a PDF document I'll right mouse click on it and say sign with cosine I'll get a preview of the document if I think everything is okay i'll double-click on on the signature field i'll choose in this case I'm going to choose one with a professional feel a graphic image that has my professional engineering seal from state of New York and I will click Sign I'll answer the identity challenge and if I do now you can see I've digitally sign this PDF I will along save it and then I can send it where I wish that person only needs to open it in i think im using nitro PDF here that works the same an adobe reader it will open the document scroll down to signature line and i don't know if you guys can see this or not but i like it properties I could see signature is valid and again just like in word I can see all the details of who signed it when they find it and why they signed it and actually demos a little better an adobe reader i think i was just trying out nitro PDF this last week so there's a example in in PDF one more example in PDF 3 form if I click sign with co sign this document does not have a pre-established signature field I just just to show you in sign things freeform me increase this a little bit with one hundred twenty five percent I can use this feature drawing a box where I want my signature on the document I can choose the appearance click Sign answer the identity challenge and same thing now I've applied a signature on the document free form in a location that I wanted okay so that's that's a couple quick crude demo not not too hard to use and gives you all the properties of a standard digital signature so just just as a review you know digital signatures are open standards their peer reviewed their vetted and endorsed by standards bodies like NIST in the US Sen Europe iso internationally I ATF wc3 a digital signature will always give you a visible confirmation if if the implementation has done well of the integrity is the integrity of the signatory intact yes is the document document integrity intact yes you'll get a green check mark if anything's been tampered with you'll get a red X the point is a digital signature will ensure that no tampers ever go undetected in in and along your electronic process okay this is part of the demo I just saw it showed you it's what does it look like for for users in Adobe Reader you'll see a little green checkmark up here and you'll always see a visible signature you can drill down and look at the details behind the signature and in this case you'll see proof of the signers identity proof of ciders and tension and by reason code proof of the date and time and proof that the document has not been modified since the signature was applied okay so when you have this sort of evidence in in the document this is what allows your business process to move with less friction because the the properties of trust and integrity are carried in the signed document itself you're not having to access external systems or logs to check the integrity everything is in the document so what you're doing when you're digitally signing a document is your that act of signing it actually transforms the document to a legally enforceable record because it carries the evidence with it and this prevents misunderstandings when when the evidence is in the document and can be viewed at the same level by all the stakeholders the chances for misunderstanding who signed it when they signed it why they signed it and what they signed note nobody's going to disagree so when when you're employing this sort of a mechanism in your electronic process this avoids misunderstandings misunderstandings either slow things down or can unravel things so this type of clear evidence ensures that you'll have less misunderstandings in your electronic process okay and integrity and Trust so with that I'd like to turn it over to Brian Hayes from agile framework and Brian please let me know when to advance your slides okay thanks John and they'll also thank you Nancy and everybody else for joining joining us maybe give you a little bit of contact first advil frameworks is in fact wholly owned subsidiary running or tech corporation and you give you some history to talk about why bra dinner check chose a RX just to start with back in 2005 we were noticing all of the things that John talked about relative to the state signing process just a lot of use of paper documents had to be printed to be wet signed and then scanned in so not only the paper but also the imaging costs were involved in that and then of course the electronic document doesn't really fully indicate your your document store because the signed document ends up being what you need so you need the scam document as well of course it's can document is generally an image so you lose the text quality of the document which is a problem in the race enterprise content management or document management solutions because in order to do full text search a new of course need a text document and so there are all these various issues that we notice back in 2004-2005 and so we were looking for a solution than I really have three things in mind when we were doing that solution search number one we were looking for a solution el standards-based and something that using the non proprietary standards the standard digital signature of the pki the things that John talked about that was important because we wanted the interoperability we wanted to know that it had some length under it and that it had the approval of the various standards bodies the second thing I wanted was something that was relatively turnkey we were developing solutions for the business and I did not want to have to put my development scheme on a different track and ask them to start developing a standard based digital signature solution I was looking for a product that more or less could give me that black box that I could I could bring into the organization and we could get up and running and get going fairly quickly and we actually did in very short order start using this ARX finally the third thing I was looking for was something that offered an open API we were developing solutions business line line of business solutions and I wanted something that I could actually call and utilize any exercise an API such that i could and more or less the signing process into into that application and and so those were the three criteria and of course the air x cosine product was really fit to build for us the business problem the business challenge is that Braun air tech as architectural engineering and consulting firm does a lot of work in the field there's a lot of documents hundreds of thousands of documents are created and those those are really project deliverables for the various lines of business that brought intertech conducts and of those hundreds of thousands of documents many of them require signature and they'll require a signature either in the case of that John was example that God was giving for credentialing purposes practicing engineers Brown intertek employs many practicing engineers other sorts of credentials for example certified inspectors require a signature sometimes they go along with a seal sometimes they go along with a certifier ID so there's that credentialing piece that often need to be as needs to be associated with documents that are produced and secondly as a symbol of quality for on intertech wanted to be able to say you know when we apply a signature that is our that is our sign of quality that something has been reviewed and that the engineer for example approves of the the deliverable so those were the business issues we are trying to solve it finally in terms of the business issue we noticed that as we built our process based solutions and we've developed these end-to-end process solutions the need to have to print up a document in the middle of the process wet sign it scan it back in was not just the addition of cost that really basically became a showstopper for creating and and automated business process so that's why we chose Eric's cosine meth that's what we implemented in our solutions agile Kramer says the wholly-owned subsidiary was actually for and in 2011 and we actually have taken these products to market we're actually a partner of a RX now taking this to market and part of our solution involves and we call it powered by a pair part by cosine so maybe John you can go to the next slide and we'll talk about some more detail so again here's the overview abroad intertek again agile frameworks founded in 2011 wheat brand we brand our signature solution agile stamp powered by cosine and that is particular for AC firms who who actually license our I'm not a field product but we also look at it as a in a larger sense in terms of what John demonstrated that it goes beyond our products well I'm just a moment they lost my slide so our Board of Directors decided to roll those out and and actually market those products let's move on so again the costs end up being pong into many categories I think that what we address in in what we try to address in the automated solutions all boil down to a couple of different things first of all cost of Allegiance and to the extent that you can bring in process efficiency and effectiveness you are going to avoid that cost you're also going to avoid as I said earlier the cost of paper the cost of imaging and the cost of postage when you're using electronic documents with a with a standard digital signature on them and so if you are continuing to use wet signatures you are not taking advantage of what what this type of technology can give you which is that cost avoidance and and to the extent that you can leverage it in an hour your organization you can actually generate a competitive differentiation with other organizations in your industry another thing is the service quality addressing service quality and the terms and often people think of service quality they think turnaround time as one of the properties of service quality the ability to turn things around quickly and meet clients needs faster than what your competition may be doing and then finally risk avoidance John talked about this in terms of your documents having that that embedded within them that credentialing I guess you that credentialing child with both the original document as well as these designers identity embedded in that that hash on that document so let's move on a little bit and we'll look at some more specifics so our workflow in our in our products involve the entry of field or permission and that field information needs to be qualified it needs to be reviewed and at the point of that field information is actually a report is being generated we stamp the signature on it and as John showed you there can be many kinds of different signatures it can be a PE seal it could be a personal signature of personal so you can sure with the logo many different options for doing that and I think here as you see on this slide there's a workflow where if you have to generate paper as part of the workflow then you're you're dropping your your efficiency and managing your projects and your processes it's not that necessarily that you're eliminating paper from the office and that was an impediment platitude of the old days where we're going to have the paperless office the idea is you eliminate paper from the process paper can always be printed but if it becomes part of the process we're printing and scanning has to occur then you you're that efficiency has just been affected in the negative way so let's see process and the ability to the open API as I mentioned earlier to be able to build your business process and then directly work with the cosine service in your business process that's a big that's a big reason that brought intertek chose it is because we can create a seamless process for people to sign documents broad intertek probably signs more than 150,000 documents a year and doing those effectively and efficiently without having to print and scan is very important and as you can imagine as a significant cost reduction let's move to the next slide so what do we see what have we seen well since 2005 we've been a customer brought in pics on a customer of a RX and our very very conservative estimates have shown us that we're probably saving a hundred thousand dollars or more and simply the cross reduction of labor the postage the generation of paper the imaging and every image way to church for that goes into this but labor the big part of this when for example a single engineer may have to approve a hundred documents a day the ability to go in and say I hope I've reviewed all of these 25 documents i would like to stamp everyone with my digital signature is a big part of that reduction on cost and John said this earlier once your users have used this whether they're using it with Advil framers products or whether they're using it with the other tools that John talked about or your PDF word out of whatever the case may be your content authoring tools your users once they get used to it will not want to go back in fact I've had I've had several people call me after they left drawn intertech and mentioned to me that they they have the digital signature capability because they've noticed the difference after missing it this has really been we didn't expect this to be a large source of savings for us because we were looking at just making the process run smooth in terms of our business solutions but it actually has saved a lot of money and again like I said our users will not go back I believe we have another slide John so some of the takeaways are first of all being able to when you're developing a business process is that you want to create a solution that is relatively simple and it's relatively simple whether you're signing a word document or whether you're embedding the designing process in some other application and you can create a user experience that that really leads towards users using this often and really wanting to be able to apply it so many different areas of the business the allowing multiple signatures for document we found this to be very useful for things like major proposals or contracts where what we have is multiple executives that need to sign a document and in the past we would use overnight mail and we have everybody put their wet signature out things now that process can be expedited because we have one user after another sign sign separate sections of the document maintaining the integrity of the digital signatures on there and then being able to send that document out quickly and efficiently portability is very important the idea of portability and and John can talk to this more i'm sure the idea of taking the signature service wherever you are whether you're a remote worker whether you are running an application on the web the ability to to sign wherever you are the abilities also in the fact that this standards-based and that's a that's an IT component of portability which means that it can be integrated with all kinds of content authoring tools whether their proprietary that you develop in your own organization or whether they are commercial solutions or products that you buy on the market John didn't you want to add on this slide I I think you I think you captured it what what the the standards do and I think this is one of the more interesting things is it makes your signed record atomic and self-contained meaning it can move from place to place an affordable way and because the signature can be inspected and verified that mobile record has effect wherever it lands it has legal effect it has business effect and force so this is this is the point of key benefits of these standards thank you Jeff thank you for adding that if you move to the next slide then we'll so on this piece on this slide we are a regional company and the idea is that you know we can manage the integrity of our electronic document that's going you know from wherever they are going and and we apply a level of management and control over our documents especially when you consider that that document management systems or enterprise content management systems become part of the mix in there and the archiving of electronic documents is really the way that most most companies are going instead of having the having the reams and reams of paper and and and file cabinets the electronic dark archiving is really the way of the future and that's the way that broaden our tech is moving as well the the idea of managing the signature privileges professional central's this becomes part of the the secure store in the in the provider so in the cosine authority for example broad intertek or i should say agile frameworks is an issue of those certificates and credentials and controls those at a global level and of course the automated workflow which we spoke of earlier this enables you to build electronic signature into that workflow okay John okay and I think that brings us to the Q&A part of the webinar and will hand it back to Nancy for that thanks a lot Brian you're welcome thank you all right thank you both um so we just have about ten minutes left in the presentation and we've got several great questions I'll just jump right in a question one the wording is for architecture we're not seeing many municipalities accepting digital or electronic signatures and what about states are they accepting co-signed documents so Brian I I can comment on that and then if you would like to add fine you basically if the state level there was a statute called uyeda it was signed in 1999 ratified at the state level and all states have now as of 2003 I think comply with you eita there are four states that have modifications to you eat it but they have some some form of you Rita that give legal force and effective digital signatures I think where people tend to get confused is there are organizations or geographies or were provinces where they don't accept electron on it content and where you don't have electronic content you cannot have a digital signature so if the place you're working and insists on paper you can't have a digital signature however if they allow electronic content the digital signature should certainly be accepted and have legal force and effect I would I would just echo that job agile frameworks we are your marketing on a national level in pretty much every state that we are working and we are seeing accepts the electronic content digital signatures great thank you um what about a topic that that I know is really popular among our readers is the engineering field John is there anything more you'd like to add about how those can be incorporated into the digital signing process yeah so basically when in the cosine solution we allow the organization to centrally manage this digital signature credentials along with any number of graphic images so we have engine customers that have engineers with PE feels in all 50 states and maybe five provinces in Canada and they will store all of their professional fields in in the secure cosine appliance this is a fifth secure appliance and when they hit that sign button they get to choose from a pulldown which graphic image which seal they would like to apply I gave one example where I had a New York PE seal so basically when you digitally when you sign with cosine you're applying two things simultaneously with the same integrity you're applying the standard digital signature and that graphic image and any downstream tampering once signed with either the graphic or or the digital signature or the document will invalidate the digital signature so the digital signature puts a seal a tamper-evident seal over everything including the image of the PE seal a quick comment on that one John we found where it's been an unexpected advantage for the seal credentials to be maintained in the cosine appliance oftentimes organizations have trouble you know maintaining the security of these rubber staffs who has access some access to them who had the keys to the file cabinet they're contained in etc well I mean that's built in to the cosine appliance so once those those PE seals are digitized and part of the credential in the in the appliance you in effect have that control in place correct the because I appliance was designed to ensure that no third party could access any signatures signatories signature credentials or signature function that's inherent in the design of the cosine solution and now that same protection can be a can be extended to the the feel the pecl can be stored in the same projected area along with the digital signature credentials yep so um a couple questions about file formats John as far as a file formats supported and when it comes to sending a document for digital signature to an outside user clarifying what type of software they need to have on their end where you know we have users autocad other cad solutions photoshop those sorts of solutions that not not there's a lot of non-users out there among their clientele how does how does that all fit into the picture so so to verify a digital signature you don't need any cosine software whatsoever to make a cosine digital signature you will either need to have the cosine agent installed on the application server if it's a web or cloud server or if the document happens to be on the desktop you need to sign on the because the documents on the desktop you have to sign on the desktop you will need to install a small cosine agent on the desktop so it depends on what application you're using if its cloud-based or web-based there's an agent that installs on the server if and it depends on where you're managing the content its contents managing the cloud everything's in the cloud or in the network since everything stays in the network if your content is on the desktop you have to sign it on the desktop so there you would need a cosine agent what about compatibility with specific cab solutions particularly autocad file formats Revit microstation those types of solutions that are popular in aec right so under autodesk autocad and microstation we provide the the agent in a way that autodesk an autocad expect to have the key provider and the signature provider present okay so as far as Autodesk in AutoCAD once the agent is installed it's seamless you'll have a user interface and Autodesk or microstation that gives you a signature button when you push that signature button that application autodesk or microstation automatically communicate with the cosine agent for the purpose of applying cosine signature features to that content okay but it's all done through the native interface of autodesk or microstation thank you so I think we have time for maybe one last question how about so architecture and construction professionals are a very mobile group can you talk for a second about the mobility the accessibility to cosign in the digital signature process from mobile devices sure so the cosine supports a mobile web strategy so if your application is available through a standard web browser you will be able to make a digital signature on the document and it doesn't matter if you're accessing it through a mobile device a pad device or a desktop but you do have to have a full-featured web browser either on the accessing device and your application has to support web access in other words you know some people get confused they believe that full documents are pulled down to mobile devices and then when they when they are pulled down there maintained in the same electronic format as when the document is on a desktop this is this is a big misnomer what people don't understand about what's going on in the background when you view a PDF on your desktop or you view a word document on your desktop it's a different binary representation than when you're viewing those things on a smartphone okay because the smartphone has a completely different operating system different interpreters different viewers so you don't pull the document down to the smartphone for the purpose of making a signature you view the document from your smartphone the document has maintained best maintained on a centralized server and then you can hit a still hit a sign button from your mobile phone and have your signature applied to the document but the document object cannot be transcoded signed on the mobile device and then retrans coated in sent back somewhere else if you if you do that transcoding you're basically tampering with the representation of the document so that will that will ruin the integrity check of the digital signature so when it comes to mobile devices the best strategy is still a mobile web strategy where you're accessing and viewing your documents through a web browser okay great so no special web apps necessary it all just automatically transports itself to mobile devices yeah there's a new tagline here there's not an app needed for that there's no out for that and no app needed yes they did no I've needed for that yeah right got it thank you so we're running a little over I better wrap up just want to point everyone to the ARX website for more information ARX com fantastic website if you head over there there are all kinds of details about the software about digital signatures there's if you look under the resources tab there's an FAQ page that addresses a lot of the common questions about cosine and there's a free trial available for download which is always great and don't hesitate to contact the company directly by email at sales at AR XCOM there's also a nice big orange button on their website that facilitates that process um as I mentioned earlier uh we will we have recorded this presentation today will make that recording available very soon as well as the slide deck within 24 hours you'll all receive an email with a link to those resources that wraps up our presentation today thank you John martini from a RX thanks to ryan hayes and thank you to everyone who took the time today to join us we appreciate it have a great day thanks very lately been too well