Costa Rican Assembly Approves New Law On Digital Signatures

by Leroy Baker, Tax-News.com, New York

25 August 2005

Costa Rica's legislature, the Asamblea Legislativa, has approved a new law creating digital signatures in a bid to cut down on the incidence of fraud taking place in the country.

The measure, which was passed unanimously by the assembly on Tuesday night, will create a Dirección de Certificadores de Firma Electrónica within the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología. This new system, which uses secure encryption, will allow computer users to register their digital signatures for later verification by others to identify the user.

It is expected that government agencies and lawyers will be among those who will take advantage of the new system, in the process saving themselves the necessity of making trips to the Registro Nacional. The new law also stipulates that any electronic document that would require a notary's validation must also have that validation applied electronically.

A digital signature (not to be confused with a digital certificate) is an electronic signature that can be used to authenticate the identity of the sender of a message or the signer of a document, and possibly to ensure that the original content of the message or document that has been sent is unchanged.

Digital signatures are easily transportable, can be automatically time-stamped, and in theory cannot be imitated. They can be used with any kind of message, whether it is encrypted or not, simply so that the receiver can be sure of the sender's identity and that the message arrived intact.

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