Financial Cryptography

Cross-border Notarisations and Digital Signatures

My notes of a presentation by Dr Ugo Bechini at the Int. Conf. on Digital Evidence, London. As it touches on many chords, I've typed it up for the blog:

The European or Civil Law Notary is a powerful agent in commerce in the civil law countries, providing a trusted control of a high value transaction. Often, this check is in the form of an Apostille which is (loosely) a stamp by the Notary on an official document that asserts that the document is indeed official. Although it sounds simple, and similar to common law Notaries Public, behind the simple signature is a weighty process that may be used for real estate, wills, etc.

It works, and as Eliana Morandi puts it, writing in the 2007 edition of the Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review:

Clear evidence of these risks can be seen in the very rapid escalation, in common law countries, of criminal phenomena that are almost unheard of in civil law countries, at least in the sectors where notaries are involved. The phenomena related to mortgage fraud is particularly important, which the Mortgage Bankers Association estimates to have caused the American system losses of 2.5 trillion dollars in 2005.

OK, so that latter number came from Choicepoint's "research" (referenced somewhere here) but we can probably agree that the grains of truth sum to many billions.

Back to the Notaries. The task that they see ahead of them is to digitise the Apostille, which to some simplification is seen as a small text with a (dig)sig, which they have tried and tested. One lament common in all European tech adventures is that the Notaries, split along national lines, use many different systems: 7 formats indicating at at least 7 softwares, frequent upgrades, and of course, ultimately, incompatibility across the Eurozone.

To make notary documents interchangeable, there are (posits Dr Bechini) two solutions:

1. a single homogenous solution for digsigs; he calls this the "GSM" solution, whereas I thought of it as a potential new "directive failure".
2. a translation platform; one-stop shop for all formats

A commercial alternative was notably absent. Either way, IVTF (or CNUE) has adopted and built the second solution: a website where documents can be uploaded and checked for digsigs; the system checks the signature, the certificate and the authority and translates the results into 4 metrics:

• Signed - whether the digsig is mathematically sound
• Unrevoked - whether the certificate has been reported compromised
• Unexpired - whether the certificate is out of date
• Is a notary - the signer is part of a recognised network of TTPs

In the IVTF circle, a notary can take full responsibility for a document from another notary when there are 4 green boxes above, meaning that all 4 things check out.

This seems to be working: Notaries are now big users of digsigs, 3 million this year. This is balanced by some downsides: although they cover 4 countries (Deustchland, España, France, Italy), every additional country creates additional complexity.

Question is (and I asked), what happens when the expired or revoked certificate causes a yellow or red warning?

The answer was surprising: the certificates are replaced 6 months before expiry, and the messages themselves are sent on the basis of a few hours. So, instead of the document being archived with digsig and then shared, a relying Notary goes back to the originating Notary to request a new copy. The originating Notary goes to his national repository, picks up his *original* which was registered when the document was created, adds a fresh new digsig, and forwards it. The relying notary checks the fresh signature and moves on to her other tasks.

You can probably see where we are going here. This isn't digital signing of documents, as it was envisaged by the champions of same, it is more like real-time authentication. On the other hand, it does speak to that hypothesis of secure protocol design that suggests you have to get into the soul of your application: Notaries already have a secure way to archive the documents, what they need is a secure way to transmit that confidence on request, to another Notary. There is no problem with short term throw-away signatures, and once we get used to the idea, we can see that it works.

One closing thought I had was the sensitivity of the national registry. I started this post by commenting on the powerful position that notaries hold in European commerce, the presenter closed by saying "and we want to maintain that position." It doesn't require a PhD to spot the disintermediation problem here, so it will be interesting to see how far this goes.

A second closing thought is that Morandi cites

... the work of economist Hernando de Soto, who has pointed out that a major obstacle to growth in many developing countries is the absence of efficient financial markets that allow people to transform property, first and foremost real estate, into financial capital. The problem, according to de Soto, lies not in the inadequacy of resources (which de Soto estimates at approximately 9.34 trillion dollars) but rather in the absence of a formal, public system for registering property rights that are guaranteed by the state in some way, and which allows owners to use property as collateral to obtain access to the financial captal associated with ownership.

But, Latin America, where de Soto did much of his work, follows the Civil Notary system! There is an unanswered question here. It didn't work for them, so either the European Notaries are wrong about their assertation that this is the reason for no fraud in this area, or de Soto is wrong about his assertation as above. Or?

Posted by iang at June 30, 2008 08:02 AM | TrackBack