By now, everyone is familiar with the digital signature scheme used by many governments to verify identities.
The technique is widely adopted by major financial institutions such as Bank of America, Visa and PayPal.
But the digital signatures system used by the U.S. government can be even more difficult to defend.
In a new report released Tuesday, researchers at Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University, and members of the Digital Privacy Consortium, warn that the government’s signature verification scheme is inherently insecure and potentially vulnerable to malicious actors.
The digital signature system is used by more than 200 countries and several hundred international organizations, including the U.
“We are concerned about the potential for fraudsters and other third parties to exploit the weakness to forge digital signatures and use them to manipulate digital signatures,” the report says.
“As a result, we are recommending that digital signature systems be deployed in more contexts to ensure security and privacy.”
The report says that digital signatures are inherently vulnerable to attacks, as they are not physically generated by a trusted third party, but are a software program that can be tampered with.
For example, an attacker could spoof the digital signing process to create a signature that has the same signature but that differs from that used by a legitimate party.
In addition, an adversary could change the digital signed signature to produce an illegitimate signature.
A malicious actor could also use a digital signature to sign a document without revealing its author or signature.
“As a consequence, digital signatures should be deployed as an additional layer of security to protect against fraudsters who might use digital signatures to generate fraudulent digital signatures, as well as other attacks against digital signatures that are not yet well understood,” the study says.
“This report underscores that the digital digital signature infrastructure, which is used in many places worldwide, is inherently vulnerable and could be abused for malicious purposes.”
Researchers say that governments should implement a strong digital signature protocol that will help ensure the integrity of digital signatures for individuals, organizations and governments.
“The United States government should take steps to protect digital signatures from the risk of tampering, while simultaneously addressing the needs of businesses and individuals,” said Dr. Ramiro Rodriguez, the report’s lead author and a computer science professor at Stanford.
“We believe that the U
