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3 Different Types of Signatures

Elise Williams

2024-04-18 11:56:27 • Filed to: Signature Knowledge • Proven solutions

If you are no so familiar with the use of electronic signatures or simply signatures you may easily get confused about those traits that constitute an e-signature and the different types of signatures, categorized by evidential power as well as legality. People use different signature styles in demonstrating their approval of the contents of a document. In this article, 3 different types of signature styles are introduced for you.

# 1: 3 Different Kinds of Signature
# 2: Best Free Signature Tool

3 Types of Different Signatures

1. Click-to-Sign Signatures

E-signatures in this class include e-squiggles, tick boxes, typed names, etc. This type of signature does not have cryptographic protection of documents, which could be in formats like PDF, Doc, and others. Thus, they’re not enough for providing strong evidence of those that signed or powerful enough to protect your document from unwarranted change. Click-to-sign signatures can be cut or pasted easily from one document to the other. This category of electronic signatures should not be used on their own.

2. Basic Electronic Signatures

In employing this kind of signatures, you apply your hand-signature mark on the document. Documents signed in this manner are protected using a crypto digital signature. With basic electronic signatures, the cryptographic digital signature is designed with the aid of a server-held signing key (your service provider may own this key).

Usually, this kind of signatures may require the user to be registered, and their identity verified in one of the registration steps. Whether users are registered this type of signature or not, the identity of the signer cannot be directly verified from the signed document.

3. Advanced Signatures

Advanced electronic signatures offer the most reliable level of assurance and trust as it makes use of distinct signing keys for each signer. This links the identity of the user directly to the signed document in such a way that all users can verify it independently with the aid of an industry standard PDF reader. It is pertinent to note that both advanced signatures and qualified signatures are technically referred to as digital signatures instead of electronic signatures.