J2EE™ Security for Servlets, EJBs and Web Services: Applying Theory and Standards to Practice

Digital Signature

Encrypting the digest of a message with the private key using asymmetric cryptography creates the digital signature of the person or entity known to own the private key. Anyone with the corresponding public key can decrypt the signature to get the message digest and verify that the message digest indeed corresponds to the original message and be confident that it must have been encrypted with the private key corresponding to the public key. As the private key is not made public, it can be deduced that the message was signed by the owner of the private key. Generally, these are the same properties as the ones associated with a signature on paper.

Note that use of a digital signature requires a digest algorithm and an asymmetric ...