Digital signatures Mathematics & Economics Research Paper

Digital Signatures
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The 21st century will go down in history as one that has been heavily characterized by technological developments that have impacted various sectors of the economy. These technological enhancements are opening up the world into a global village where individuals from different regions continuously interact on personal and business levels. From the business perspective, they facilitate the completion of transactions without physical meet-up between the buyers and sellers. Conventionally, once the business transactions were completed the transacting parties would sign off to showcase that ownership had indeed been exchanged. However, in the current dynamics where business transactions are completed online, the technological concept of digital signatures has come into effect. With digitization that continues to characterize the globe, digital signatures assist in mitigating not only the tampering but also impersonation of digital communication. The research paper purports to conduct a thorough and extensive examination into the technological concept of digital signatures.
Understanding Digital Signatures
Conventionally, handwritten signatures and stamped seals were used to reflect the completion of transactions and engagements between two parties. However, times have changed significantly and the above are slowly being replaced by their digital equivalent in digital signatures. According to Mason (2005), “A digital signature is a mathematical technique used to validate the authenticity and integrity of a message, software or digital document”. Unlike handwritten signatures and stamped seals, digital signatures provide more inherent security. They also mitigate on issues that arose from impersonation of digital communications by unscrupulous individuals. Additionally, digital signatures assist to assure the receivers which in most cases are usually the buyers as to the evidence of the origin. They also not only provide the identity but also the status of electronic documents (Cheng, 2012). Digital signatures also in some cases acknowledge informed consent by the signer.
It is essential to note that digital signatures are built on public key cryptography’s that is otherwise known as asymmetric cryptography. They also use the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) which is basically a standard and accepted format that that is provided by solution provider such as DocuSign. According to Cheng (2012), “PKI requires the provider to use a mathematical algorithm to generate two long numbers, called keys. One key is public, and one key is private”. Based on the above facts, a digital signature is created or established when the signer appends their signature electronically on a document using their private key which they are supposed to keep safe from unscrupulous sources and as shown in the figure below. With mathematical algorithm such as RSA, data that matches the signed document known as hash is created and encrypted and consequently forming the digital signature (Lenz, 2010). The created digital signature usually has the exact time that the document was signed clearly indicated.
Consider this scenario. Tom appends his signature electro...