My own, and other organisations are interested in an electronic signature app for nextcloud. See for example:
Note there is a difference between n Electronic Signature and a Digital Signature. A Digital Signature is a cryptographic signature, and Electronic Signature is less specific, but still fully legal in most industrial jurisdictions, method of electronically signing documents, where the main requirements are that there is some verification of identity, e.g. via an email, and a recording of intent to sign.
An electronic signature or e-signature, is a legal way to get consent or approval on electronic documents or forms. One of the most relied upon definitions of an electronic signature is “an electronic sound, symbol or process attached to or logically associated with a record…adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record.” Electronic signatures can be used to replace handwritten signatures in virtually every personal or business process.
So what is required for such an app is the following:
Select/upload a document for signing (at least support pdf documents)
Select the places where it is to be signed (e.g. by drawing a box overlay on the pdf)
Select places where some other information can be input, e.g. at a minimum text input and dates, so signer can input, e.g. their name, address, job title in appropriate places
Allow the places to be signed or details to be input to be assigned to an email address/user
Send document out for signing to the email addresses
Recipients can open document to be signed and complete information and upload signature to go in signature box, but only in the places assigned to them in step 4
Once a signature and other data has been entered, recipients click some button to indicate they have completed signing and signal legal “intent-to-sign”
When all recipients have signed, pdf of signed document is created and made available to all participants to download.
I’d be interested in getting quotes for such an app. I think it could be easily crowdfunded, such commercial services are quite expensive, at least 300 euros per year, and increasing with the number of users.
It’s also a real need for my company. It could be great if the place where to sign can be defined when producing the pdf. For a large amount of pdf, it’s exhausting to draw on each document.
I think I could provide a little fund for this functionality. I could also participate in the specification writing.
My company eID Easy is doing exactly that and so far for other platforms.
As was previously noted then there is difference between Digital and “just electronic” signature. We can do both.
Qualified electronic signature (digital signature) where user signs with its national eID card, USB token or similar. This is the highest level of electronic signatures. Costs 7-20 cents per signature.
PDF visual signature where user is drawing signature image to the PDF, where confirmation page is added with audit trail: IP-s, times and actions (Sent, opened, signed) and once everyone has signed then e-Seal is added that prevents document from further editing. We provide the e-Seal and can build the the visual signature and confirmation page creation as well. Costs 7-15 cents per document with your own company e-Seal. 20-30 cents per document if using eID Easy e-Seal.
If you are interested in having this NextCloud plugin built then please let us know. You can find contact email and phone from eideasy.com website.
Nextcloud doesn’t develop specific features like that. If you have an enterprise subscription, they certainly will checkout the needs of their customers. Certainly if there are enough paying customers they will do it at some point, in doubt check out with them directly.
The other way is here that you find a developer (like @Margus_Pala) who is doing that for you. You agree with them to pay a certain amount for it, and then perhaps share the costs with others.
So there are a few different concepts going on in this thread regarding signatures;
cryptographic signature, which is basically an encrypted checksum of the file or portion of the file, generated with the user’s private key, verifiable by using the user’s public key.
actual graphical signature applied to the document,
verification of intention of the user to sign the document amounting to a log entry,
any combination of the above.
The value of (1) is questionable unless there is a universally trusted 3rd party involved, who would be responsible for vouching the identity and authenticity of public keys. This would require the user to enrol with the 3rd party in the form of a face-to-face process to check 2 pieces of government ID and enter your identification along with the public key you provide.
(3) is also easy. That plugin won’t do it right now, but could be updated to do that fairly easily as a matter of keeping a log of userid and IP address of users who have modified the file.
We - intarsys - are mantaining the Nextcloud App Sign Live! . It connects Nextcloud to a signature server called gears which can be hosted on premise or in the cloud. I.e. data can be kept as private as wanted. gears offers different possibilites of creating advanced or qualified signatures (see description of the app) and is already in use with different customers.
Currently the signature can be requested from within the files app for one ore many documents. Only workflow is missing. Nextcloud would support a general workflow app if there is a big customer (>500, 1.000 users). We are intersted in support such an app, if necessary also financially.
We are currently working on a patch for NC 25, to be delivered in end of April.
In this context we will also test with NC 26, normally I would not expect problems.
