Digital Signatures: A Business View

Abstract Electronic commerce has been carried out successfully for years without the use of digital signatures (DSs). Hundreds of billions of dollars of commercial transactions are quite adequately handled each year using the 30+-year-old technologies of electronic data interchange (EDI), electronic funds transfer (EFT), and semiprivate communications links called value-added networks (VANs). Why, then, over the past few years have digital signatures been increasingly seen as necessary to digital commerce? And why have digital signatures had such a high profile in the trade press and even the popular press?