 | |
| Industry | Software as a Service |
|---|---|
| Founded | November 19, 2010 |
| Headquarters | 1000 Innovation Centre Kanata, Ontario K2K 3E7 |
| Products | Electronic signatures |
| Website | signority |
Signority is a cloud-based [1] electronic signature provider based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada that provides web-based public and private cloud electronic signature solutions. The company was co-founded in 2010 by Jane He and Qingbo Jin. [2]
Signority has its headquarters in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It was incorporated as a federal and a provincial (Ontario) corporation on November 19, 2010 by two Canadian entrepreneurs: Jane He and Qingbo Jin. At inception, the company name was EPEink (Electronic Pen/Paper Electronic Ink) and the product name was GreenSignatures. [3] In January 2013, the company and the product were re-branded to Signority.
Signority has had two applications filed to United States Patent and Trademark Office:
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an encryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories, and whole disk partitions and to increase the security of e-mail communications. Phil Zimmermann developed PGP in 1991.
Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is a cryptographic system that uses pairs of keys. Each pair consists of a public key and a private key. The generation of such key pairs depends on cryptographic algorithms which are based on mathematical problems termed one-way functions. Effective security requires keeping the private key private; the public key can be openly distributed without compromising security.
A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature, where the prerequisites are satisfied, gives a recipient very strong reason to believe that the message was created by a known sender (authentication), and that the message was not altered in transit (integrity).
A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a set of roles, policies, hardware, software and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store and revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption. The purpose of a PKI is to facilitate the secure electronic transfer of information for a range of network activities such as e-commerce, internet banking and confidential email. It is required for activities where simple passwords are an inadequate authentication method and more rigorous proof is required to confirm the identity of the parties involved in the communication and to validate the information being transferred.
In cryptography, a public key certificate, also known as a digital certificate or identity certificate, is an electronic document used to prove the ownership of a public key. The certificate includes information about the key, information about the identity of its owner, and the digital signature of an entity that has verified the certificate's contents. If the signature is valid, and the software examining the certificate trusts the issuer, then it can use that key to communicate securely with the certificate's subject. In email encryption, code signing, and e-signature systems, a certificate's subject is typically a person or organization. However, in Transport Layer Security (TLS) a certificate's subject is typically a computer or other device, though TLS certificates may identify organizations or individuals in addition to their core role in identifying devices. TLS, sometimes called by its older name Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), is notable for being a part of HTTPS, a protocol for securely browsing the web.
In cryptography, X.509 is an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standard defining the format of public key certificates. X.509 certificates are used in many Internet protocols, including TLS/SSL, which is the basis for HTTPS, the secure protocol for browsing the web. They are also used in offline applications, like electronic signatures.
In cryptography, a web of trust is a concept used in PGP, GnuPG, and other OpenPGP-compatible systems to establish the authenticity of the binding between a public key and its owner. Its decentralized trust model is an alternative to the centralized trust model of a public key infrastructure (PKI), which relies exclusively on a certificate authority. As with computer networks, there are many independent webs of trust, and any user can be a part of, and a link between, multiple webs.
In cryptography, a certificate authority or certification authority (CA) is an entity that issues digital certificates. A digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate. This allows others to rely upon signatures or on assertions made about the private key that corresponds to the certified public key. A CA acts as a trusted third party—trusted both by the subject (owner) of the certificate and by the party relying upon the certificate. The format of these certificates is specified by the X.509 or EMV standard.
S/MIME is a standard for public key encryption and signing of MIME data. S/MIME is on an IETF standards track and defined in a number of documents, most importantly RFC 3369, 3370, 3850 and 3851. It was originally developed by RSA Data Security and the original specification used the IETF MIME specification with the de facto industry standard PKCS#7 secure message format. Change control to S/MIME has since been vested in the IETF and the specification is now layered on Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS), an IETF specification that is identical in most respects with PKCS #7. S/MIME functionality is built into the majority of modern email software and interoperates between them. Since it is built on CMS, MIME can also hold an advanced digital signature.
An electronic signature, or e-signature, is data that is logically associated with other data and which is used by the signatory to sign the associated data. This type of signature has the same legal standing as a handwritten signature as long as it adheres to the requirements of the specific regulation under which it was created.
A certificate policy (CP) is a document which aims to state what are the different entities of a public key infrastructure (PKI), their roles and their duties. This document is published in the PKI perimeter.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is an email authentication method designed to detect forged sender addresses in email, a technique often used in phishing and email spam.
Electronic authentication is the process of establishing confidence in user identities electronically presented to an information system. Digital authentication, or e-authentication, may be used synonymously when referring to the authentication process that confirms or certifies a person's identity and works. When used in conjunction with an electronic signature, it can provide evidence of whether data received has been tampered with after being signed by its original sender. Electronic authentication can reduce the risk of fraud and identity theft by verifying that a person is who they say they are when performing transactions online.
Email encryption is encryption of email messages to protect the content from being read by entities other than the intended recipients. Email encryption may also include authentication.
The Certificate Management Protocol (CMP) is an Internet protocol standardized by the IETF used for obtaining X.509 digital certificates in a public key infrastructure (PKI).
Transient-key cryptography is a form of public-key cryptography wherein keypairs are generated and assigned to brief intervals of time instead of to individuals or organizations, and the blocks of cryptographic data are chained through time. In a transient-key system, private keys are used briefly and then destroyed, which is why it is sometimes nicknamed “disposable crypto.” Data encrypted with a private key associated with a specific time interval can be irrefutably linked to that interval, making transient-key cryptography particularly useful for digital trusted timestamping. Transient-key cryptography was invented in 1997 by Dr. Michael Doyle of Eolas, and has been adopted in the ANSI ASC X9.95 Standard for trusted timestamps.
Trusted timestamping is the process of securely keeping track of the creation and modification time of a document. Security here means that no one—not even the owner of the document—should be able to change it once it has been recorded provided that the timestamper's integrity is never compromised.
GlobalSign is a WebTrust-certified certificate authority (CAs) and provider of Identity Services. As of January 2015, Globalsign was the 4th largest certificate authority in the world according to the Netcraft survey.
In cryptography, server-based signatures are digital signatures in which a publicly available server participates in the signature creation process. This is in contrast to conventional digital signatures that are based on public-key cryptography and public-key infrastructure. With that, they assume that signers use their personal trusted computing bases for generating signatures without any communication with servers.
Suhayya "Sue" Abu-Hakima is a Canadian technology entrepreneur and inventor of artificial intelligence (AI) applications for wireless communication and computer security. As of 2020, her company Amika Mobile has been known as Alstari Corporation as she exited her emergency and communications business to Genasys in October 2020. Since 2007, she had served as President and CEO of Amika Mobile Corporation; she similarly founded and served as President and CEO of AmikaNow! from 1998 to 2004. A frequent speaker on entrepreneurship, AI, security, messaging and wireless, she has published and presented more than 125 professional papers and holds 30 international patents in the fields of content analysis, messaging, and security. She has been an adjunct professor in the School of Information Technology and Engineering at the University of Ottawa and has mentored many high school, undergraduate, and graduate students in science and technology more commonly known as STEM now. She was named to the Order of Ontario, the province's highest honor, in 2011 for innovation and her work in public safety and computer security technology.