Digital signatures, on the other hand, refer to the encryption / decryption technology on which an electronic signature solution is built. A digital signature alone is not a type of electronic signature. Rather, digital signature encryption secures the data associated with a signed document and helps verify the authenticity of a signed record.

Official documents are hardly worth anything unless officially signed. The aforementioned solution was one way to sign an electronic document. Another way to sign these files was to scan a copy of your signature and place it on a document as an image. The problem with these solutions, however, is that it’s rather easy to forge a signature in both instances. Without much effort, someone can scan a copy of your signature and place that on a document, making it look like you signed it.

PDF software makes this unlikely because digital signatures are more than a mere graphical representation of a signature. Instead of ink, or a scanned image, a digital signature uses digital keys (aka, public-key cryptology) to attach your identity to the document.