Digital tools have now gone beyond the boundaries of simple corporate bureaucracy to transform themselves into real strategic assets, capable of managing and unblocking geopolitical crises in real time. Proof of this is the use of electronic signatures for the agreement between the United States and Iran, for which a physical ceremony will be held tomorrow, Friday 19 June, near Lucerne, Switzerland. The Memorandum of Understanding, which lays the foundations for a permanent ceasefire between the two countries, was in fact validated remotely: President Donald Trump signed the document digitally while he was in Versailles for a state dinner with Emmanuel Macron. An operation that demonstrates how this technology guarantees absolute security and full legal value even at the highest levels of international diplomacy.
What is meant by electronic signature and what it can be used for
What happened in international diplomacy reflects, on a much more complex scale, the principles that regulate electronic signatures also in the daily lives of European citizens, even if agreements between states follow international law rules distinct from eIDAS. Having made this necessary specification, let’s now see what the electronic signature is and what it can be used for.
We must understand first of all that, on a legal level, the electronic signature is not a single product, but a general principle defined, in our case, by the European eIDAS regulation. There are different levels of security.
- The simple electronic signature is the basic category: a common example is a normal email or the signature we put on the courier’s tablet for a package. Its legal value is not absolute and is assessed by the judge on a case-by-case basis.
- Going up a level we find the Advanced Electronic Signature or FEA, which guarantees a unique connection to the signatory and control of the medium: we often use it in banks or in insurance through the graphometric signature, the one written by hand on the tablet which detects the pressure and speed of the stroke.
- The maximum level is the Qualified Electronic Signature or FEQ, which is legally equivalent to the handwritten signature on paper and is valid throughout Europe.
In Italy, the most widespread and regulated form of FEQ is the digital signature, a system based on a pair of asymmetric cryptographic keys (one public and one private). eIDAS allows other qualified devices (QSCD) to issue an FEQ, but the Italian digital signature remains the prevalent implementation.
If we sign with FEQ, the burden of proof is reversed in case we want to deny the signature: anyone who claims not to have signed cannot simply deny it, but must file a complaint of forgery. In any other type of dispute, the ordinary rules on the burden of proof remain unchanged.
From FEQ arise the automatic (or massive) signature, which allows you to sign huge flows of homogeneous documents such as invoices without looking at the screen, and the signature of a folder, which simulates the old “signature book” allowing us to approve a whole group of different files with just one PIN code entry. Finally, there is the electronic seal, a technology that mirrors the signature but intended for legal entities (companies and institutions) rather than individual citizens, created to certify the origin and integrity of a document.
The typology that Trump may have used to sign the US-Iran agreement
To avoid the long logistical and organizational times of a traditional summit in a moment of maximum tension, the diplomats chose the path of speed, exchanging the document in a protected manner and postponing the physical ceremony until tomorrow 19 June near Lucerne, Switzerland.
The technical details of the procedure have not been made public, but in general it can be assumed that isolated networks, protected videoconferences and secure satellite channels were used in such delicate scenarios. To ensure that the text did not undergo alterations of any kind, according to some experts it is probable that cryptographic hashes combined with an asymmetric digital signature were used: the hash, alone, acts as a digital fingerprint of the file (just modify a comma to alter it), but it is the digital signature that makes it secure, because it prevents anyone from recalculating a valid hash after tampering.
