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- Hacker News
- It’s a neat proof of concept, but it’s hard to see the organizations that care about certified documents adopting this. Inherently conservative. Let’s Encrypt invested a lot in their early partnerships and used that to sneak up on the conservative buyers and trusters of certs.by 1123581321
- Looks interesting, but in order to actually compete with any e-signing platform you'll at the very least need to have templates with pre-filled information, an API to autofill docs with required information, and more field types. Right now for example, you can only add text, checkbox, and date/signature fields. Checkboxes are required to be checked (no making them optional), so if there are multiple checkbox options, they have to check them all to continue. Not very useful for actual e-signing flows.by mfkp
- A few months ago, I released the Open Claiming Protocol, in order for an interoperable, open standard for people cryptographically signing things. I wonder, how does this overlap with that, and could it be useful to support it? I agree it's much more general purpose though...
I know that there are some sites, like proofofexistence.com that acts like a notary service anchored to Bitcoin. Is that similar?
To me, it seems that there are some secret things you might want to hash and sign, and timestamp, like agreements that you can prove that both parties signed them, etc.
by EGreg - I don't like the idea of this using bitcoin. I wonder if it's possible to build this off of regular PKI - certificate transparency logs for instance encode the proof of commitment, while the signature can be an X509 certificate.
- The standards exist. The problem is, the certificates are not cheap, because there is real KYC needed.by sscaryterry
- Tried to poke a little to see if I can find any name (I could not). Challenge with this domain is the TRUST anchor. As an organization/company you have to establish yourself first (directly or through reference) otherwise its hard for anyone to trust you.by sandeepkd
- Loved it until I saw its using Bitcoin. With proof of work doesn’t it tie this project to a bit of an environmental nitemare? Bitcoin isn’t the best place for this, no?
I would have imagined Ethereum or some other ledger would have been better no?
Anyone with more crypto ledger knowledge be able to say what I’m trying to say more precisely.
by evolve2k - Any benefits over DocuSeal?by jkahrs595
- Why not use RFC 3161?
Due to how the code signing works, timestamping servers are provided by all major CAs with full public access, e.g. timestamp.digicert.com, timestamp.comodoca.com, timestamp.sectigo.com, etc.
PS. OP, your comments are auto-killed for some reason. You may want to message mods to get this sorted.
by eps - Thanks for the heads up on the comments, ive messaged. Not sure if this will be flagged too.
Youre right, I conflated two things in my reply to sscaryterry. B-T needs an RFC 3161 token from any TSA. Its only a qualified timestamp under eIDAS that needs a QTSP. Those are separate claims I ran them together.
Although the code already has the path. The signing service uses pyhanko with an HTTPtimestamper pointed at timestamp.digicert.com, and its switched off at every call site. Reason was availability, an external TSA sits on the signing path, so if its slow or down, sealing fails, whereas the anchor is async and can never fail a seal. That reasoning holds for the default and doesnt justify never offering it.
It should be optional, and on where the caller wears the dependency, which also gets pyhanko to embed validation info and go to LTA rather than just B-T. Only thing I want to check first is the terms on those public TSAs, since a few are scoped to code signing. Opening an issue, and thx agaain.
by nsokin - It's astonishing how easy it is for an LLM to convince its user they have an idea worth a genuinely sound standard, let alone an open standard.
Each open standard where it's clear the only consultation was between the prompt engineer and Claude is as tedious as the weekly cryptocurrency whitepaper of the mid-2010's.
The only novel factor in the proliferation of lazily prompted open standards is we have a perfect demonstration of the futility of LLLM sycophancy when combined with a mind looking for an easy win.
by bbg2401 - Nice idea but with all related things the ultimate question remains whether courts will actually recognize it.
Currently courts will still consider paper-signed and scanned PDFs as legally binding, so any verification on top of that is superfluous to them.
More realistically, you take an oauth when you take the stand at the court, and if a signed document was altered by the counterparty you'd say so truthfully, if it weren't, you'd say so truthfully, and the penalty of that oauth purjury is high enough that most people wouldn't do it. Cryptography not needed.
by qurren - *oath. For a while it got me wondering how OAuth figures in all this.by rgun
- This depends completely on the jurisdiction. This is simply not universally true.by sscaryterry
- You can't be the "Let's Encrypt of" anything if it's self-hosted. The entire point of Let's Encrypt is that there is a centralized reputable entity of note signing everyone's keys. Without that, it's entirely worthless. It's no better than a self-signed SSL cert or putting your own PGP key on a document manually. There's no point in a layer of abstraction atop that.by vitally3643
- To be fair, they do host it. And they do have their own trust anchor.
If you recognize it or not, is another topic.
by szszrk - In my opinion, all of these open source/free/open document signing tools are neat on paper (and technically fulfill the goal of being able to verify a document's chain-of-custody/signature provenance) - but won't take off in any meaningful way legally because there's no entity behind them taking the responsibility for accuracy and culpability.
DocuSign/Adobe/whomever is trust anchor, it's an entity you can sue or subpoena if something goes wrong. Someone who's actually on the hook for making sure whatever's signed is accurate and truthful (outside of the reputational risk of fraud completely obliterating any trust in your platform)...
No amount of cryptographic verification substitutes for having a legal person on the other end who can be held accountable for actually verifying the document was signed accurately/process was followed.
by JCBird1012 - that's true. i think that if it's obvious that the audit is finding everything, every detail, every file, piece of data touched.... at what level do we need to verify?by hnscum
- Indeed. It doesn’t meet the requirements of EU qualified signatures or seals, for example.by layer8