Electronic seals

Qualified and advanced signatures for organisations

What the company stamp or official seal of an organisation is in the analogue world is now transferred to the digital age with the help of the electronic seal. Sealing companies can use electronic seals to ensure proof of origin, time, integrity and authenticity of the content of a digital file. Electronic seals are technically based on the same procedure as an electronic signature. For signature applications, the Signing Service offers advanced and qualified electronic seals in accordance with the EU regulation eIDAS as well as advanced and regulated seals in accordance with the Swiss law ZertES for organisations (legal entities).

Efficiency through mass signature

Sealing applications are designed to give longer-term approval for sealing by means of 2-factor authentication by the person responsible for the organisation. For example, thousands of invoices can be sealed overnight without a single approval.

Legal conformity in the EU and Switzerland

Both the Swiss law ZertES and the EU regulation eIDAS provide for electronic seals and thus allow legal entities to carry out legally compliant signatures on behalf of an organisation as a legal entity and to present a sealed document as evidence.

Security and trust

Our partners have dedicated signature applications for you that allow documents to be sealed without Swisscom receiving the content of the documents.

Protecting integrity and authenticity

With the electronic seal you also “seal” your document, i.e. no one can change it afterwards without the change becoming visible. The name of the organisation is checked by Swisscom and can be seen in the seal. Adobe Reader also displays your document with a green mark.

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The sealing
process

With the remote signing and sealing solution, the signature application and the signing service of Swisscom Trust Services are permanently connected to each other via an encrypted connection, the so-called Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, whose private key is under control of the authorised representative of the organisation. This key controls the start and duration of the connection for the document hashes to be sealed.

1. Choice of digital documents for seals

A legal entity or organisation wants to add an electronic seal to many different digital documents (e.g. acknowledgements of receipt, invoices, laboratory reports or certificates and diplomas) in an application with integrated signing service.

2. Unique identification of the legal entity

To use the Signing Service, the authorised representative of the organisation is identified once using an identification application in order to sign the seal application with a qualified electronic signature. The identification runs via our Smart Registration Service or another approved KYC process. In addition, Swisscom carries out a verification of the organisation creating the seal using registers and/or certified register extracts and checks the authority of the representative of the legal entity. Swisscom then creates a long-term certificate for the organisation, which contains only the organisation name and place.

The partner application ensures that only the identified, registered and responsible persons of the organisation have access to the private key of the access certificate, which secures the connection between the signature application and the signing service. The partner application has submitted an implementation concept to Swisscom, which has been reviewed and approved by Swisscom.

3. Request of the electronic seal

In the application with integrated signing service, Swisscom compresses the documents as hashes and transmits them in a batch process. Individual authentication is not necessary here.

4. Authentication, time stamp and electronic seal

The legal entity has authorised the batch transfer before the transfer by authorising the private key of the access certificate created by the organisation as the means of authentication. Swisscom provides the compressed document with an electronic seal and a qualified electronic timestamp and sends it back to the seal-creating application. This ensures the authenticity, integrity and time of the document from the legal person or organisation in the digital world.

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Areas of application

Fraud prevention

Protect your organisation from fraud on the internet by electronically seal your digital documents, e.g. certificates, diplomas or attestations. In this way, your customers can be sure that the digital documents originate from your organisation and that there is no forgery.

Digital archiving

Use electronic seals in the area of business records archiving. Thereby, you can e.g. archive scanned paper documents in an audit-proof manner after applying a qualified electronic seal and time stamp.

Digital inbox

Use electronic seals when digitising your incoming and outgoing mail. You can automatically seal and time-stamp mails, digital invoice, whereby your business mail becomes evidence-proof and shows authenticity.

Evidential value before authorities

Provide courts with electronically sealed documents, e.g. as evidence, or quickly and easily seal your organisation’s applications for participation or expressions of interest for government authorities.

Legally compliant and certified

With the Signing Service as a remote signature solution from Swisscom Trust Services, you are choosing the only pan-European service provider of legally valid qualified signatures, taking into account industry-specific requirements and compliance regulations. We are approved trust service provider according to eIDAS in the EU and approved certification service provider according to ZertES in Switzerland.

EU regulation eIDAS

Swiss Federal Law ZertES

Time stamp protocol ETSI EN 319422

DIN-Norm 419.241-1

PDF/A

PAdES

EU Trusted List

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