OpenStudio offers to all its customers and members the opportunity of requesting a Digital Signature Certificate, completely for free!

What is a Digital Signature?

The digital signature is the result of an IT procedure based on cryptographic techniques that allows a binary number (the signature) to be inextricably associated with an IT document, or another set of bits that represents legally relevant facts, acts or data. It is essential to give legal validity to electronic documents in a series of contexts such as the signing of contracts, declarations or administrative documents in the public and private sectors.

What is a digital signature and what is it for?

It is not a "simple" electronic signature, but a particular type which is based, in fact, on the above-described cryptographic key mechanism. The digital signature must refer unequivocally to a single subject and to the document or set of documents to which it is affixed or associated.

The affixing of a digital signature integrates and replaces the affixing of seals, punches, stamps, marks and brands of any kind for any purpose provided for by current legislation.
In simple words, the digital signature is a type of electronic signature that meets particularly stringent requirements relating to guaranteeing authenticity, integration, reliability and legal validity of documents. It has the same value as a handwritten signature (a feature that other types of electronic signature do not have).

How the digital signature works

The digital signature is a tool that allows citizens, professionals and businesses to sign documents, making them become documents with legal value, and is the result of an IT process based on the concepts of:

authenticity, to ensure and guarantee whoever signed the document also assumed responsibility for its content
integrity, a condition that serves to demonstrate from the moment it was signed until the moment it is used it has never been modified
non-repudiation as the person who signed the document using an electronic signature cannot then deny it.