Legal and Security Aspects

Abstract

The characteristics of digital documents that are desirable for normal tasks pose severe security problem in official documents, which must be tackled and solved in order to foster digital document adoption in formal environments. This chapter deals with security and legal aspects concerning digital documents and their production, exchange and exploitation. This is a hot topic as long as digital documents are progressively taking the place of classical paper ones also in the administration context, where issues such as property, non-withdrawal, certification, protection of content cannot be ignored. Hence, the current trends in cryptography and digital signature technologies to solve these issues are proposed, along with the legal initiatives in various countries to enforce digital document exploitation.