Abstract

Signatures are a significant part of the legal, commercial and even artistic personality and credibility of individuals and their existence is essential for validating not only the most important international documents but even a simple greeting card. A signature on a document, is the most significant evidence for attributing its contents to the signatory, indicating the acknowledgement and acceptance of the contents of the document by the parties who signed it with their knowledge and consent. For this reason, security of this process is of utmost importance and entry of such process in the electronic and digital space, makes it twice as much important.

Due to this, without existence of the necessary security infrastructures in the digital space, there is no possibility of providing electronic services, because without availability of the technologies required for validating and regulating the electronic documents, electronic signatures cannot be trusted.

The requirement of legislation along with these technologies for providing this security, is one of the most effective factors for realization of this subject, since in other words, proper application and implementation of such technologies is subject to enactment of some statutes related to this issue.

Therefore, in this research, considering the importance of the part of definitions, recognition of the title and its effect on the most careful study on approaches and differences of legal systems in this regard, we first review and describe the electronic signature in various legal systems. Subsequently, the paper progresses to explain different approaches of such systems towards the issue of security of the electronic signatures. After reviewing relevant laws in different countries including the United States, France and Iran, we designate an appropriate approach regarding the security issue in the electronic signature space.

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