Digital Signatures at Data Amplified 2023
Digital signatures play a crucial role in ensuring the integrity and authenticity of digital business reports. These reports, which can significantly impact an organisation’s value and reputation, require a high level of trust. Digital signatures provide verifiable proof of a document’s authenticity and integrity, ensuring that it hasn’t been tampered with since being signed.
Introducing digital signatures to XBRL reports faces certain challenges – which in recent months, the Digital Signatures – or D6 – working group has been working to overcome. Earlier this year the D6 working group announced the release of the first Public Working Draft of the “Digital Signatures in XBRL reports” specification. This draft is nearing the end of the feedback period – with the specification soon to progress to the next stage.
For those interested in delving into the topic in more detail, during Data Amplified last year XBRL International’s Paul Warren introduced us to the work that the D6 working group has been undertaking to standardise and implement the digital signatures specification. The goal is not to create a new signature technology but to apply existing ones consistently and effectively to ensure the integrity and authenticity of XBRL-tagged financial reports.
Paul began by discussing the rationale behind applying digital signatures to XBRL documents, emphasising the need for accountability and integrity in digital reports.
XBRL involves specific challenges that make digital signatures tricky, such as the dependency on multiple files and the need for partial signatures. These are some of the knotty questions that the D6 working group has been exploring.
Although the specification is not yet ready for implementation, we encourage interested stakeholders to take an active role in its development – and watching Paul’s talk is an ideal place to start!
Watch the video of Paul Warren’s presentation at Data Amplified 2023 here.
