The last 10 years have seen an enormous amount of legal, regulatory, and technological activity aimed at designing a proper electronic equivalent to handwritten signatures. One such design, that of cryptology-based (or digital) signatures, has succeeded over other solutions to the point where, in certain legal systems, such as those of the Member States of the European Union, electronic signatures are almost exclusively understood to be inevitably based on public-key cryptography. Yet, several archival institutions (including the National Archives of Canada, Australia and the US) have expressed ambivalence at the prospect of preserving digitally signed records. This research approaches the discrepancies between technical, legal and archival responses to the problem of long-term preservation of digitally signed documents as founded on diverging understandings --- physical vs. contextual --- of electronic authenticity.

Blanchette, J.-F., "The Digital signature dilemma", Annals of Telecommunications (accepted with revisions). [PDF preprint]

Blanchette, J.-F. & Banat-Berger, F., "La « dématérialisation » du livre foncier d'Alsace-Moselle: Archivistique et preuve électronique", Document Numérique, special issue on "Archivage et pérennisation", 8(2):63-72. [PDF preprint]

Blanchette, J.-F., "Defining Electronic Authenticity: An Interdisciplinary Journey", in Supplemental Volume of the 2004 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2004), June 28-July 1, 2004, Florence, Italy, pp. 228-232. [PDF preprint]

Blanchette, J.-F., "The Digital Signature Dilemma: To Preserve or Not to Preserve ?", in Proceedings, IS&T 2004 Archiving Conference, April 20-23, 2004, pp. 221-226. Springfield, Virginia: The Society for Imaging Science and Technology. [PDF preprint]

Blanchette, J.-F., La conservation de la signature électronique: Perspectives archivistiques, Direction des Archives de France, Ministère de la culture, September 2004. [PDF]