Glossary
Electronic Signature
An electronic signature records a specific person's intent to sign a document, captured through whatever means the signing platform uses — a typed name, a drawn signature, a click confirming agreement — tied to enough surrounding evidence (identity verification, a timestamp, the specific version of the document actually presented) to establish who signed what, and when. This is a genuinely different mechanism from code signing, which cryptographically proves a software artifact's origin and integrity; an electronic signature is about a person's recorded intent to agree, not a mathematical proof over a file's bytes.
The strength of an electronic signature's evidentiary value depends entirely on how rigorously the platform verified the signer's identity and how tamper-evident the resulting record actually is — a signature captured with weak identity verification and a record that could plausibly be altered afterward provides considerably less assurance than one built on stronger verification and a genuinely tamper-evident record, even though both might look identical as a rendered signature on the page.