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In May 2021, a group of researchers at the Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) published an IEEE symposium paper on problems with certification signatures in PDF. The authors’ findings are summarized on the PDF Insecurity website. Since iText’s products are often used as part of digital signing workflows (including to create certification signatures), we felt compelled to comment. In this blog post, we’ll take you through some background on these new attacks, and explain what you can do about them.

Securing and automating digital document workflows is increasingly important in the modern business world. A crucial part of creating secure digital signatures is generating public and private keys for signing, and cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft now offer highly-secure cryptographic key management services. Since iText is used by many businesses and signing services to integrate secure digital signatures into PDFs, this step-by-step article shows developers how to use iText 7 and the AWS KMS APIs to generate a digital signature and add it to a PDF document.