Adobe and GeoTrust announced that, for customers that need stronger electronic signatures, a new jointly developed certified document solution (CDS) goes online today.

The system, beta-tested by customers including John Deere and RSA Security as well as government agencies, only allows people to sign documents if they’re in possession of a USB hardware key. After a PDF is signed, GeoTrust then attaches a certificate to it, which will be recognized by Acrobat, Adobe Reader, and the LiveCycle forms software.

In the beta program, customers used the system to sign electronically distributed government documents, bank statements, product notifications to distributors, customer and partner communications and legal documents.

The main reason for developing this system, says John Landwehr, Adobe security evangelist, was that the software signatures currently implemented in Acrobat were not adequate for some customers.

“While we have been doing digital signatures since Acrobat 4, they required plug-ins, configuration, and a bunch of other things that limited the use to inside the firewall in a very managed environment,” Landwehr says. “It made it difficult for an organization to publish documents to the masses” and be able to verify to the end user opening the PDF in Reader that no pixels had been altered from the original.

For organizations using forms that its customers fill and sign via Reader, the GeoTrust CDS also works as an anti-“spoofing” and “-phishing” tool, to foil hackers impersonating a company in order to steal account information from individuals.

“All recipients will know that a form came from you,” Landwehr says. “You [can confirm that you] don’t have a rogue ‘spoof’ form asking for personal information and it’s getting hijacked by some hacker halfway around the world.”

Another way companies might use the technology, he says, is to certify that press releases and other media announcements actually are coming from them--and aren’t hoaxes dreamt up by enemies or pranksters.