XAdES Plugtest Remote Event – XML Advanced Electronic Signatures

As we announced in the PAdES post, ETSI Centre for Testing and Interoperability (CTI) is organizing a new Remote Plugtests Interop events for XAdES Signatures from 14th March to 28th March 2012.

This Remote event aims at conducting interoperability test cases on XAdES signatures (TS 101 903) and the XAdES Baseline Profile (TS 103 171).

This testing will provide full test coverage of the both specifications including testing signatures evolution, simulating real life situations.

This Plugtests event will enable participants to conduct 4 types of tests (Interoperability and Conformance):

• Generation and cross-verification (Positive) tests
• Only-verification (Negative) tests
• Signature Upgrade tests
• Conformance testing on XAdES Baseline Profile signatures

The purpose of these events is:

• To enable participants to assess the level of interoperability of XAdES.
• To identify additional issues that should be taken into account in future XAdES standardisation activities.
• To improve the quality of XAdES specifications.
• To ease the introduction of XAdES signatures, by providing the means to solve interoperability problems before widespread deployment..

You can get more information on plugtests portal for electronic signatures:  http://xades-portal.etsi.org/pub/index.shtml

As shown in our website, we can provide you a little description about de XAdES profiles differing in protection level offered. Each profile includes and extends the previous one:

• XAdES, basic form just satisfying Directive legal requirements for advanced signature;
• XAdES-T (timestamp), adding timestamp field to protect against repudiation;
• XAdES-C (complete), adding references to verification data (certificates and revocation lists) to the signed documents to allow off-line verification and verification in future (but does not store the actual data);
• XAdES-X (extended), adding timestamps on the references introduced by XAdES-C to protect against possible compromise of certificates in chain in future;
• XAdES-X-L (extended long-term), adding actual certificates and revocation lists to the signed document to allow verification in future even if their original source is not available;
• XAdES-A (archival), adding possibility for periodical timestamping (e.g. each year) of the archived document to prevent compromise caused by weakening signature during long-time storage period.

After this, you may be interested in free downloading one of our  development kits for Java, .NET or PHP from our website for developers to electronically sign on XAdES format.