The European Commission has developed an open source software for e-signature creation and validation that Member States could use at national level under the ISA programme for the interoperability of public services in Europe (more info at http://ec.europa.eu/isa/actions/01-trusted-information-exchange/1-9action_en.htm. This tool aims at facilitating Member States to render their public e-services more efficient and to ensure interoperability for one of the key-enablers for secure electronic services, i.e. e-signatures. The tool also allows for the automated creation and verification of electronic signatures based on trusted lists as established under Decision 2009/767/EC.
DSS provides all the functionalities for the creation and validation of e-signatures. For validation, the software relies on the information in MS trusted lists of certification service providers issuing qualified certificates (established in accordance with Decision 2009/767/EC).
The DSS software allows Member States to create and verify X/CAdES based formats up to the long archiving or -A form and PAdES formats up to LTV.
In particular,
- supports the requirements in Commission Decision 2011/130/EU (common signature formats);
- for verification makes use of Member States' trusted lists;
- is available under the form of an SDK and as a standalone application;
- allows easy use of the MOCCA adapter to increase the support of MS national smartcards at the signing side.
This open source software, currently called DSS (Digital Signature Services) is published at the Commission's open source software repository Joinup.
A new release DSS 2.0.1, published on 11 April 2013, contains some improved features as described at http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/sd-dss/release/release201 and a so-called "cook-book" is provided in documentation which is targeting the implementers /developers and aims at facilitating the integration and use of DSS into their applications. The document provides examples of code which allows easy handling of digital signatures using the Release 2.0.1 of DSS and can be downloaded at https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/sd-dss/release/release