Question

In 800 words describe the digital signatures and certifying authorities including their relation to RSA Public and Private Key encryption.mathematics behind the technology, what are the major recognized authorities, and the likely future for this technology/business practice. Include digital signatures and certifying authorities including their relation to RSA Public and Private Key encryption. Please type

A. Describe how its use in large companies

B Compare the laws USA and other countries

Answer 1

Answer:-

A)ans

describe the digital signatures:-

Industries use digital signature technology to streamline processes and improve document integrity. Industries that use digital signatures include:

Government - The U.S. Government Publishing Office publishes electronic versions of budgets, public and private laws and congressional bills with digital signatures. Digital signatures are used by governments worldwide for a variety of uses, including processing tax returns, verifying business-to-government (B2G) transactions, ratifying laws and managing contracts. Most government entities must adhere to strict laws, regulations and standards when using digital signatures.

Healthcare - Digital signatures are used in the healthcare industry to improve the efficiency of treatment and administrative processes, to strengthen data security, for e-prescribing and hospital admissions. The use of digital signatures in healthcare must comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).

Manufacturing - Manufacturing companies use digital signatures to speed up processes, including product design, quality assurance (QA), manufacturing enhancements, marketing and sales. The use of digital signatures in manufacturing is governed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Digital Manufacturing Certificate (DMC).

Financial services - The U.S. financial sector uses digital signatures for contracts, paperless banking, loan processing, insurance documentation, mortgages, and more. This heavily regulated sector uses digital signatures with careful attention to the regulations and guidance put forth by the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (E-Sign Act), state UETA regulations, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC).

Digital signature vs. electronic signature

While digital signature is a technical term, defining the result of a cryptographic process that can be used to authenticate a sequence of data, the term electronic signature -- or e-signature -- is a legal term that is defined legislatively.

For example, in the United States, the term was defined in the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, passed in 2000, as meaning "an electronic sound, symbol, or process, attached to or logically associated with a contract or other record and executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record."

This means that a digital signature -- which can be expressed digitally in electronic form and associated with the representation of a record -- can be a type of electronic signature. More generally, though, an electronic signature can be as simple as the signer's name being entered on a form on a webpage.

To be considered valid, electronic signature schemes must include three things:

• a way to verify the identity of the entity signing it;
• a way to verify that the signing entity intended to affirm the document being signed; and
• a way to verify that the electronic signature is indeed associated with the signed document.

RSA Public and Private Key encryption.:-

The RSA algorithm is the basis of a cryptosystem -- a suite of cryptographic algorithms that are used for specific security services or purposes -- which enables public key encryption and is widely used to secure sensitive data, particularly when it is being sent over an insecure network such as the internet.

RSA was first publicly described in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, though the 1973 creation of a public key algorithm by British mathematician Clifford Cocks was kept classified by the U.K.'s GCHQ until 1997.

Public key cryptography, also known as asymmetric cryptography, uses two different but mathematically linked keys -- one public and one private. The public key can be shared with everyone, whereas the private key must be kept secret.

In RSA cryptography, both the public and the private keys can encrypt a message; the opposite key from the one used to encrypt a message is used to decrypt it. This attribute is one reason why RSA has become the most widely used asymmetric algorithm: It provides a method to assure the confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, and non-repudiation of electronic communications and data storage.

Many protocols like Secure Shell, OpenPGP, S/MIME, and SSL/TLS rely on RSA for encryption and digital signature functions. It is also used in software programs -- browsersare an obvious example, as they need to establish a secure connection over an insecure network, like the internet, or validate a digital signature. RSA signature verification is one of the most commonly performed operations in network-connected systems.

B)Compare the laws USA and other countries

It is well known that the US is the most heavily technologized society; if you count TVs, phones, microwave ovens, cars or personal computers per person, you'll find that the numbers are far higher than in Germany, or than in pretty much every other country for that matter. Clearly, they are also world leaders in many key technologies, such as military applications, space exploration, biotech, software and computer chips.

Americans generally embrace new technologies enthusiastically; it's cool just because it's new. By contrast, Germans are somewhat more reluctant and don't try out new stuff without given a good reason to do so. Sometimes new technology is even made fun of: in the early years, if a German saw someone with a cellular phone, they would often assume that the person felt a need to appear important. If a cellular phone or beeper went off in a cinema, concert or restaurant, Germans could get pretty angry. (All this has changed in the last couple of years however; now everybody has a cell phone. But the same mechanism is still in effect, for instance with respect to Bluetooth headsets.) While every kitchen, office and cafeteria in the US is equipped with a microwave oven, people in Germany are still debating whether microwaved foods are good for you and whether microwaves may have detrimental effects on people with pacemakers. Already in the 1990s almost everyone in the US had a computer at home; many Germans didn't see the need until much more recently. New (and not so new) technologies are usually more expensive in Germany than in the US, average income in Germany is lower, and Germans tend to cling to their money more.

Some of this may be attributed to the generally higher level of optimism in America. If you present a new idea, people will usually respond with "Sounds great, let's try it!", while the typical German reply is "This won't work because..."

This is not the full story however. I am constantly amazed by the poor quality and backwardness of many technologies routinely employed in the US. Sometimes I think that while Germans tend to tolerate outrageous prices without complaint, Americans tolerate substandard quality. Here are some examples, I keep discovering more every day:

• Cellular phones in the US have operated for a very long time using an ancient analog protocol, while pretty much all other countries in the world had adopted digital standards several years earlier. It was trivial to listen in on these cellular conversations since they were not scrambled in any way (there was a whole underground scene of eavesdroppers who exchanged tapes of the juiciest conversations they were able to capture), and it was also easy to place cellular calls on someone else's bill.
• The banking system is archaic. It appears as if banks are not electronically connected at all (even though they are). It is not possible to instruct your bank to pay your rent every month directly into the landlord's account (the usual method in Germany). Every month, you have to write out a check, send it physically to your landlord, who carries it physically to his bank, which sends it back to your bank in order to get the money. Banks tell you to keep your account number secret, but it is openly printed on every check, along with your name and address. Some banks now offer "bill paying services"; this only means that *they* will mail the check to your landlord instead. Another new system, heralded as a huge achievement, is "Direct Deposit" or "Automatic Payment". It allows one to make regular payments such as salary, insurance or utility payments directly without checks. It does not work between private accounts and it takes about one month to set up. (In Germany, it takes no time to set up a plan like that; you instruct your bank and then it works.)
  Many US banks now offer "Internet banking" and claim to be on the technological forefront. All you can do with these services is move money from your checking account into a savings or investment account, check your balance and find out which checks have cleared. Almost all these site use a completely insecure static user/password login scheme; virtually all internet banks in Europe use one-time passwords or cryptographic challenge-response systems.
  Merchants in the US accept checks, which of course can be easily abused; German merchants only accept secured checks.
  You will actually see Americans write out checks at super market checkout counters, and many people set aside an afternoon every month for "balancing their checkbook" and "paying the bills", two activities that nobody has even heard of in Germany.
  In Germany, checks are not used to pay bills. You simply instruct your bank to transfer the money into the payee's account on a regular basis, or give permission to the payee to suck the money out of your account.
  US ATM cards work in German ATM machines while US ATM machines could not accept German cards until a few years ago. However: for a while the US ATM system was much more secure than the German one since the PIN was checked online with the issuing bank; German ATM cards used to encode the PIN on the card with a globally valid key so that offline operation of ATMs were possible. Today Germany's system is much more secure, since all ATM cards contain a chip; it is not possible to simply skim the magnetic strip information and PIN in order to create a duplicate card (unless you intend to use this duplicate card outside of Germany).
• Digital ISDN telephone lines have been available to every German household for many years. In the US, service started much later, some local telephone companies still don't offer them, and it's generally poorly supported where available. Far from being a well-defined standard, ISDN in North America consists of a zoo of slightly incompatible protocol variations. The analog phone system still uses tone dialing which for a long time made it possible to dial for free from every public phone with a $2 phone dialer. Plans for such dialers were readily available on the Internet.
• Online services and network computers: "Bildschirmtext" in Germany and "Minitel" in France have been accessible by everyone since the eighties. Both use dial-up telephone connections to browse material on central servers and allow individuals to publish material on these servers. Bildschirmtext displays the pages on the TV (optionally on a PC) while Minitel uses a proprietary little terminal with keyboard, something that would be called "network computer" these days. Bildschirmtext was never a big success because of the high connection fees and the start up costs for the device; Minitel was a winner because the terminals were given away for free to everyone. Services of comparable quality and breadth have come into existence in the US much later.
• Videotext, a free text based information system (news, weather, stock prices, sport results, TV schedules) broadcast along with the TV signal, is common in Europe and doesn't exist in the US.
• Telephone lines, transformer boxes and electricity lines in US cities are still very often overhead, which is cheap, ugly, dangerous and makes them vulnerable to storms. Here in Minneapolis, there's a power outage every couple of months. In Germany, almost everything is under the ground now and power outages are very rare.
• The U.S. telephone number system is idiotic: all area codes are three digits long, while all phone numbers are 7 digits long. So obviously, large cities need several area codes. All these area codes count as local calls however, and local calls are dialed differently from long-distance calls. So you need to know at all times which area codes belong to your local area; when moving around in a city, you have to be aware of the area code you're currently in. And all this information keeps changing: when a city grows, they simply add new area codes. In Germany, every city has a single area code. Large cities have short area codes, small cities have long area codes. In small cities, the phone numbers are short, in large cities they're long. Solves all problems.
• If you order cable TV in the US, you often get a strange "set top box" that comes with its own remote control and has to be installed between cable outlet and TV. Some of these systems even make it impossible to watch one channel and record another one at the same time. In Germany, you just hook up your TV/VCR to the outlet; to receive pay TV you insert a smartcard into your TV set.
• Many shower heads in the US are mounted at a fixed height and cannot be adjusted, even in hotel rooms. I don't think I have ever seen that in Germany.
• Cars. Enough said.
• Many extension cords still come without a third hole for grounding in the US. When you plug things into electrical outlets, you'll often observe cute little sparks. That never happens in Germany.
• Trains. There is a single daily train connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles; there are about 17 daily connections between Hamburg and Munich (roughly the same distance). Almost all rail lines in Germany are electrified; in the US almost all trains are still pulled by diesel engines. There is a dense network of high speed lines in Germany; the US has only a single high speed line (and even that one is pretty slow).
• Washing machines. The average German housewife commands a washing machine that far surpasses the top-of-the-line model in US laundry shops. The common opening-at-the-top US model which is really not much more than a rotating cylinder represents the technological achievement of the German sixties. (To be fair: American dryers are better, bigger and stronger than German ones.)
• Many American stoves arrange the controls in a brain-dead way behind the hotplates, so that one has to reach over the boiling foods. In Germany, the controls are at the front where they belong.
• The quality of the plastic bags you get in super markets is incredibly poor, so much so that they often give you a double plastic bag with a paper bag inside.
• Many houses in the US, even here in Minneapolis where temperatures can reach negative 40 degrees in winter, still have windows with wooden frames that are opened and closed simply by sliding up and down, providing minimal insulation. Germans know these windows only from old American movies. The majority of new American homes are built with a wooden frame and little insulation in a couple of weeks, often without basements (even in tornado areas). German homes are made from brick or concrete blocks, have a basement and very good insulation.
• Sidewalks are very sloppily constructed in the US. They are often made from huge square concrete plates, and these move up and down over time to form lakes when it rains, often break, look ugly etc.
• The US is the last country in the world which still clings to the archaic Imperial system of units (inches, yards, miles, gallons, pounds). Most Americans don't know how many inches there are in a yard, how many yards in a mile, how many ounces in a gallon, how many pounds in a ton etc. (They are completely arbitrary numbers.) NASA lost a $750 million Mars explorer spacecraft in 1999 because they forgot to convert between Imperial and metric units.

Some examples of areas where I think everyday technology is ahead in the US:

• High speed Internet connections, in the form of ADSL and cable modem lines, arrived about 15 months earlier in the US than in Germany. The huge Internet acceptance advantage that the US enjoyed over Germany was due to one thing alone: flat rate pricing for telephone and Internet connections. (The internet price differences between the two countries have largely vanished in the last couple of years, in fact flat rate DSL is now cheaper in Germany.)
• Air conditioning is rare in Germany. Most Germans frown upon the idea as an unnecessary waste of energy.
• Vending machines in the U.S. generally accept coins and bills and give exact change, some also accept credit cards; vending machines in Germany (which are much rarer than in the US) often only take coins and don't give change (though I hear this has changed recently).
• Fire protection technology is generally much better in the U.S. than in Germany. German apartment buildings often have just a single staircase and no fire ladders. All doors of public buildings in the US can be opened from the inside without a key; in Germany you will often find locked doors. Fire detectors, ubiquitous and required by law in the U.S., are rarer in Germany. (To be fair, the rate of deaths-by-fire in the US is about twice the German one.)
• In Germany, people are afraid of garbage plugging up the drain of the kitchen sink and clean it out religiously; in the US you happily wash everything down, since every drain has an electric garbage disposal built in.