Document Management and Electronic Signature in an Online Contract Service

Managing and processing an electronic contract often includes the tasks of merging several documents to form a composite contract document and the superimposing of users’ signing information as a watermark on a signed electronic contract. These processes usually involve a large number of complex manual steps, and these manual steps are often tedious and may cause security faults. In this paper, we present a Web-hosted online contract service application that enables small and medium-size businesses to execute and manage contracts entirely online, such as the merging several documents to form an electronic contract and the superimposing of users’ signing information as a watermark in a signed contract, eliminating the need to work with paper documents.

In this paper, we focus on the document management and electronic signature subsystem of this Web-hosted online contract service application and their security issues. This subsystem comprises at least one administrator module and many user modules, a signature and document profile module, a task execution engine and a set of predefined task modules, an encryption engine and a signing information watermark engine. It involves a user-specific setup file of encoded security, task and document parameters generated by an administrator to authorize a user to perform a set of predefined tasks on a selected group of electronic contract documents. It also provides a user-specific task configure file generator for the user to select and configure authorized tasks from a set of predefined task modules of execution instructions. Then, its execution engine will carry out these instructions automatically in a secure environment. This subsystem has found to improve substantially the efficiency, and at the same time eliminates the potential for human error and security breaches in the performance of electronic contract management and processing tasks.