Signature Policy Publication

A signature policy can be made available through a plain or secure WWW site publication. Publication can be done by the policy issuer or by a third party through a trusted document repository service. Third-party storage can be made available for signature policy publication provided through a trusted document repository service. Such a repository can be used to generally host industry-specific terms, including signature policies. An early conceptual example of such a repository is the ICC ETERMS repository of the International Chamber of Commerce (Mitrakas, 1997; Mitrakas & Bos, 1998). When communities of users apply signature policies, signature policies have to be published and made available to the users. The source of the information needs to be trusted and ways to authenticate the source of information have to be available. It is required to publish signature policies while they are valid, so that users can have access to their description. The role of a signature policy publication authority may be directly taken by the signature policy issuer or be taken by a different organization.