On the Pivotal Role of Digital Signatures: A Review of Conception, Mensuration, and Applications

Information security is the process of protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access. It includes tools and processes where integrity is a critical feature, and it is one of the core triad components. Integrity ensures that data cannot be altered or destroyed by anyone other than its intended users. When changes need to be made, only authorized parties are allowed to do so. Cryptography helps us check for confidentiality, integrity, security, and privacy. Digital Signatures (DS) help verify that data has not been altered by unwanted parties and therefore prevent breaches of data privacy in the process. Cryptography ensures data integrity by cross-checking the mathematical hash values between incoming data with stored data; therefore it is easy to maintain consistency using cryptography. The process of matching the expected signature at the receiver’s end and then branding the message to be original with high confidence score is DS. The DS algorithm requires a secure channel between the sender and receiver, but there might be conditions to transform data from one form to another. For example, encryption converts data into an unreadable form and is unusable by unauthorized parties. Contrary to encryption, the inverse mathematical conditions convert data from the directly unreadable format into a form that is usable, without loss of information. Since the late 1970s, cryptography has gradually progressed as processing power increased; hence, DS algorithms must be stronger. A survey of different applications of DS is presented in this paper. Additionally, in this paper, we present an investigation of different applications, algorithms, technology, and mathematics used in the DS concept.