Handwritten VS Digital Signatures

The emergence of digital signatures have led to many debates about the pros and cons of digital signatures and handwritten signatures. Both serve the same purpose of authenticating a person and proving the legitimacy of a document or data. Though digital signatures have their benefits, I believe that handwritten signatures are still more stable, more widely accepted and have less issues to deal with. As digital signatures are new, they have unresolved issues and problems.

As mentioned in the article, ultimately, a digital signature is something that is signed and produced by a machine. If someone steals your machine, and with it your private key, they could pretend to be you, legitimately. The same is not true for a handwritten signature. Someone cannot steal your pen and reproduce your signature. The private key is similar to the use of seals by kings, during the olden days. If someone had secretly made a copy of the seal itself. No one could tell the difference between a real and a forged document.

Quoting the document, "A fundamental difference, then, between digital signatures and handwritten signatures is that digital signatures require a combination of computer systems and third parties to exist, and computers can have both accidental errors and malicious subversion. Handwritten signatures do not require the same ecosystem, and are not exposed to the same risks." As mentioned, though computer errors are very few and wide between, a small error or a virus in the machine could compromise your private key and thus compromise your digital signature.

Ultimately, handwritten signatures will be here for a while, at least until the major issues with digital signatures have been resolved.

Resources

https://signnow.com/resources/handwritten-vs-digital-signatures