Understanding digital signatures
A digital signature is an array of bits that provides cryptographically strong guarantees of authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiation of a digital message. What do those guarantees mean? Let’s take a look:
- Authenticity means that the message is coming from the claimed sender, provided that only the claimed sender possesses the private key that was used to produce the signature.
- Integrity means that the message has not been changed by a third party during transmission, for example.
- Non-repudiation means that the sender cannot deny that they produced the signature, provided that no one else has had access to the private key that was used to produce the signature.
A digital signature is produced using a private key that can be verified using the corresponding public key. Hence, digital signature and verification algorithms are considered asymmetric cryptography algorithms, even though they are not asymmetric encryption...
