Technical solution

Digital signing integration for Singapore's national digital identity

Generate digitally signed PDF documents for citizens' secure digital transactions

Intro

What does iText offer developers?

iText’s mission is to make the digital document workflow more secure and convenient. iText 7 is an open source SDK that lets users create PDF files in a more versatile way than with any off-the-shelf PDF creator, and provides APIs for developers to fine-tune the way they want to create, edit or manipulate PDFs according to different ISO standards or compliance regulations. It also enables them to embed its functionalities within their own software, allowing for digital transformation of your workflow.

iText 7 is capable of mass generation of PDF documents and offers many other features, such as splitting and merging documents, text extraction and redaction, rendering PDFs as images, converting HTML pages and templates to PDF and much more. We also offer solutions for PDF data extraction and low-code template design/PDF generation.
 

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Digital Signatures

What is national digital identity (ndi)?

With more transactions being carried out digitally, the Singapore Government is developing a national digital identity (ndi) to provide citizens with a secured identity to transact with both the public and private sectors.
 

Digital signing platform integration with ndi

One key feature of the iText 7 library is that it allows users to digitally sign PDF documents by handling the addition and appearance of digital signatures within the PDF. Our goal as we develop digital signature solutions is to replace wet ink signatures when using digital documents, helping people protect their privacy, and encrypt their data. This concept has been widely adopted and is well integrated into the PDF specification. 

With this goal, since 2019 iText has been involved in providing an SDK and example code for vendors who are looking to integrate their digital signing platform with the national digital identity (ndi) scheme. 

Our approach provides a more sophisticated and secure digital identity ecosystem through iText’s superior product quality and service to protect the privacy and data of individuals in Singapore. 

Why you should use iText 7 with Singapore's national digital identity?

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Get access to 4 million SingPass users

With the roll-out of the national digital identity platform, organisations will have the potential business audience of 4 million SingPass users. 

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Tap into an easy to integrate signing service with the iText SDK

The SDK provided by iText can be easily used by organisations that want to integrate their signing/authentication services with Singapore's national digital identity. 

All they need is to use the code examples provided with the SDK, and build them into their application code to call/talk to ndi whenever someone wants to digitally sign a document (e.g. work pass application, loan application, etc.) 

With this SDK, organisations can reduce the time and resources to develop your own integration with ndi.

What do we provide?

What do we provide for organizations who want to integrate with ndi?

iText has partnered with GovTech’s national digital identity (ndi) platform to assist organizations who are interested to integrate with their digital signing service. It provides a tool kit for entities in the financial, transport, insurance and healthcare sectors to integrate digital signing in their services. 
 

iText creates an integration layer by using third party open source software to interface with the ndi hash signing service for PDF digital signature implementation. 

What are the concepts of Digital Signatures? 

Usually, digital signatures are used by individuals and organizations in PDF documents to show who checked the document on a specific date/time and that the document has not been updated since it was signed. There may be one or more signatures in a single PDF document depending on the specifications and the process associated with the signing of a contract.

The actual digital signature is a portion of unseen, hashed & encrypted metadata embedded with a certificate in the file. In addition to the actual digital signature, the PDF file may also include an optional visible representation of the signature. A signature photo and/or a signing certificate summary may be included in the visible portion of the signature.

"Signing Documents for a Smarter Nation"

iText Workshop at STACK 2020

We’re pleased to announce André Lemos, our Product Manager and Pavel Chermyanin, our Senior Developer will be speaking about "Signing Documents for a Smarter Nation". In this workshop, we will collectively build and integrate with the national digital identity (ndi) programme led by GovTech, by creating a sample application that requires an authenticated and authorized user to digitally sign a contract. We will go through the workflow of not just directly interacting with the ndi Sandbox server, but also by building a web application that an end-user can interact with.

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Workshop at STACK 2020
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