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Ha! My co-worker made one of these for the same reason. Some places still require "wet" signatures, and some people (us) like to stick it to bureaucracy and prove that they can't tell the difference. For a one-liner, if you use any tool to generate a realistic version of your signature, or do what I do and actually scan a version of your signature once, and then have that as a PNG that you can drop on any PDF of your…
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The question is, can you forge your own signature? If both parties agree that the document is legally binding it seems a bit unlikely that the document would fall under the forged label. Though I am not a lawyer. It's also worth noting that digital signatures throughout the european union have legal status.
Digital signatures also have legal status in the US. Until society catches up and uses cryptographic primitives provided by a national ID smart card (such that Estonia has) for authorizing intents, this is a satisfactory method to make document execution less painful. This project is already doing the easy part (“place pretty signature picture here”). Depending on your jurisdiction and their tolerance, you could also…
National ID systems are an incredibly bad idea. You can already get the entire authentication benefit from using decentralized ID systems (your bank authenticates you with your bank card, your employer authenticates you with your employee ID), so all a national ID adds is the ability for corporations to correlate all your different identities without your knowledge or consent, which is nothing but a privacy-invasive misfeature. Note that without a centralized ID they could still do it with your knowledge and consent by having you authenticate using multiple decentralized IDs.
Centralized identity is also a huge single point of failure and compromise. It would attract far higher resources from attackers than non-monoculture ID systems do, have far reaching consequences when vulnerabilities are discovered, and take far longer to respond when changes are necessary because of the scope of use.
Does it support multipage pdf documents and doing multiple signatures per document?
Related to this, perhaps a UI for marking all the spots where signatures are required would make this tool extremely powerful!
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It's like how you have to type a whole word into a box to delete a repo on github.
That's really just a defense against deleting the wrong repo. If you're typing in the whole repo name, including the account it's under, you're very likely to know which repo you are deleting when you hit the button. (Consider the horror scenario where you both own an org repo and have a personal fork, and you mean to delete your personal fork but delete the main repo instead.)
Ha! My co-worker made one of these for the same reason. Some places still require "wet" signatures, and some people (us) like to stick it to bureaucracy and prove that they can't tell the difference. For a one-liner, if you use any tool to generate a realistic version of your signature, or do what I do and actually scan a version of your signature once, and then have that as a PNG that you can drop on any PDF of your…
Is that an invocation of the `convert` tool from ImageMagick?
The OP also uses a few other flags like `+noise Gaussian` and `-attenuate 0.25` which you could toss in. Same concept, just wanted to share a one-liner you can use if you already have a PDF with a signature on it, and you need that nice "scanned" look.
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I don't know directly, but I've heard that there are special laws regarding fraud via fax. Even though fax has no technical protection, it may have legal ones, that might give the counterparty some recourse if things went bad.
In Germany, a fax is legally considered an original copy, a scan/print is not, despite a fax often being a scan that’s then transmitted via fax protocols. Law hasn’t caught up with technology yet in that area. You also get a confirmation from the recipient when using fax.
...what's the alternative to that "often"? What is a fax machine, if not a scanner attached to a modem?
I don't get the magical power of a signature at all. Everybody can write my name under a document. This project basically allows you to forge your own signature. Is it still legally binding? Do these rules even remember the original intent?
Crytographic protocols can be added to verify signing, but until every civilian practices perfect opsec (never gonna happen), in-person signatures in front of a notary will always be the way business is done.
Better technology (this program, Photoshop, deepfakes, quantum prime factorization) may actually increase the need for in-person wet signatures.
Checking if a PDF file has been digitally signed, how many signatures are there and if the signatures are all valid is not an easy task! Actually, I only know how to do it in java using bounty castle. To help non-java apps with this I've implemented a small java application that provides a REST (and form) api for uploading a signed PDF file and returning information about the signatures.
It works in my organization for more than 3 years and it's has saved us from hundreds of erroneously signed PDF files! I've open sourced it for anybody having similar requirements: https://github.com/spapas/pdf-sign-check.