Robust WYSIWYS: A Method for Ensuring that What You See Is What You Sign

The security of digital signatures depends not only on the cryptographic strength of the digital signature algorithms used, but also on the integrity of the platform on which the digital signature application is running. Breach of platform integrity due to unintentional or intentional malfunctioning has the potential of wrongly imposing liability on, or wrongly taking liability away from signing parties. This problem is amplified by the fact that digital signatures may be generated on platforms that are not under the control of the signing party, and that there can be strong financial incentives for trying to manipulate the systems used for digital signatures. In practice it is extremely difficult to assess the integrity of a general purpose computing platform, so that digital signing on such platforms in principle is untrustworthy. This paper describes a method for robust WYSIWYS (What You See Is What You Sign) that ensures the integrity of digital documents and their digital signatures. This method can only be directly applied to documents written with traditional ASCII characters. For more advanced formatting a specific layout definition language must defined.

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