First digitally signed document a harbinger of e-government

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham two weeks ago became the first Cabinet member to send a digitally signed document to President Bush. The paper recommended that the Yucca Mountain in Nevada serve as a national nuclear-waste storage site.

Thanks to a system developed by VeriSign, with the aid of Adobe Systems, Abraham sent the more than 9,500-page report in a PDF file directly to Bush, saving taxpayers an estimated $1 million in printing costs, according to VeriSign.

Abraham's signature was graphically shown in the transmitted document and encoded with a digital "key" that linked his signature to a VeriSign system for authentication.

The document's transmission marks the end of a long journey for former Sen. Abraham, who authored the federal legislation to legalize e-signatures. But it also demonstrates the growing implementation of a technology praised for its potential but that is being adopted slowly by businesses.

Now nearly two years after President Clinton signed the ESIGN bill, or the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, the growing need for stable, secure online communications is helping expand the market for authentication software.

A few key factors are facilitating the shift. John Weinshenk, vice president of enterprise for VeriSign, explained that new commercial software applications are now readily available, easing the use of public-key infrastructure, or PKI, the technology that underpins digital documents.

Additionally, last year's anthrax scare that hampered mail delivery and terrorist attacks that crippled telecommunications systems have prompted more corporate and government groups to look to the Internet as a means of reliable and secure communications infrastructure.

"[September 11] caused a lot of interest," said Gary Moore, chief architect for global government solutions at the technology-security firm Entrust. And "it spurred interest from different parties. In the past, the interest [in PKI] has been from people doing e-government or national performance reviews. Now what we are seeing is interest coming from security people."

So far, firms like VeriSign and Entrust are entering into more contracts with federal agencies to provide secure communications. Entrust has worked with agencies like the Patent and Trademark Office to create and enhance an electronic filing system. And VeriSign spearheaded a pilot project with the Veterans Affairs Department to enable veterans to remotely transmit medical documents and prescription data into department databases.

With "the whole move to e-government" and the "increased focus on securing network infrastructure ... coming together, we are really creating the groundswell for PKI," said Barry Leffer, vice president of public sector at VeriSign.

Agencies also are helping speed that growth by producing technical standards for digital signatures and the government's PKI infrastructure. The Federal PKI Steering Committee, a project led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, recently expanded its working groups to study the implications of PKI.

While the field of PKI and digital-signature providers may be slim now, Moore said, he sees the market expanding rapidly. With regulations such as those mandating medical privacy and the elimination of government paperwork, he said, the needs are only going to grow.