Certified Document Services

Certified Documents

Communicating critical information to a broad audience presents real problems with real consequences. Phishing, identity theft, and document forgeries have eroded customer trust in electronic communications. Certifying that documents are legitimate and tamper-proof allows trustworthy online transactions and more secure communications across and beyond the enterprise.

What is Certified Document Services

Certified Document Services (CDS) is the first digital signature solution that allows authors to create Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF) files that automatically certify to the recipient that the author's identity has been verified by a trusted organization, and that the document has not been altered in any way.

CDS is the first broad implementation of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) based document-validation technology, and now anyone using Adobe Reader (6.0 or higher) can easily take advantage of it. While digital signatures are not new, providing a service to automatically certify documents from a trusted authority is new. With non-CDS digital signatures, a user must explicitly "trust" the author of a document. With CDS digital signatures, trust is built-in to the Adobe Reader and no additional software download or configuration is required by the recipient of a certified document to validate its authenticity. CDS digital signatures help ensure the highest level of document integrity because the user's digital credentials must be stored on a cryptographic hardware device, and they must be issued by a WebTrust certified authority using strict verification guidelines.

Who Can Benefit

Organizations that communicate critical information to broad audiences, such as financial services organizations and government agencies, are struggling to deal with increasing trends-from phishing to document forgery-which in turn erode customer confidence and cause liability issues. Now with CDS digital signatures, individuals and organizations can send certified Adobe PDF documents and forms with added assurances of identity validation and information integrity.

For example:

• Financial service and research organizations that publish highly valuable analyst reports
• Government organisations that publish policies, legislation, forms, and issue regulatory documents
• Manufacturing organisations that publish manuals and operating documents
• Public companies that publish financial documents
• Accounts, lawyers, company secretaries who issue accounts, contracts, and other legal documents

My Credential™ for Adobe® Acrobat®

My Credential™ for Adobe® Acrobat® and for True Credentials® Adobe® Acrobat® allow authors to create Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) documents that clearly certify to the recipient that the author's identity has been verified by a trusted organization and that the document has not been altered. This solution allows organizations to engage in more secure, reliable electronic document exchange.

Using Certified Documents is Easy

With My Credential™ for Adobe® Acrobat® in place, Adobe® Acrobat® Professional and Standard software (version 6.0 or later) makes it easy to use certified documents. Simply:

• Convert to Adobe PDF - Begin with a trusted format.
• Set security control - Choose policy options ranging from editing restrictions to encryption.
• Certify - Choose options permitting recipients access to the document.

Then distribute your document with confidence.