An application developed by ANTIC dubbed Doc@uthANTIC for securing and verifying the authenticity of official documents such as academic certificates, administrative documents and invoices has been presented to public and private institutions in the Littoral Region during a three-day seminar, 3-5 August in Douala. The event that convened participants from close to 100 public and private companies in the Littoral Region provided a platform for ANTIC to showcase its Doc@uthANTIC solution - a digital signature scheme that would help institutions combat document forgery, boost user satisfaction and ease the authentication of official documents. Thanks to this application, ANTIC seeks to guarantee the integrity and authenticity of official documents, ease the verification process as well as prevent their falsification.
Speaking at the event, ANTIC's Director General Prof. Ebot Ebot Enaw stated that the development of the Doc@uthANTIC solution has been inspired by difficulties faced by institutions in producing huge volume of official documents and securing their authenticity. He said, “ the sheer volume of official documents and certificates produced annually by the likes of government ministries, universities and examination boards (GCE and BACC) coupled with the difficulty in getting the certificates manually signed leaves these institutions with no choice but to resort to affixing scanned signatures on the certificates they issue.”
These documents which bear manual or scanned signatures, he noted, are highly susceptible to falsification and can’t be electronically verified requiring end users to manually conduct the verification process which is painstaking, time consuming and prone to errors.
In an effort to address and tackle these challenges, the Doc@uthANTIC solution which provides three key security services notably authentication of users, integrity of users and non-repudiation of signatories has been developed to secure the authenticity of official documents, ANTIC’s Director General, Prof. Ebot Ebot Enaw, stated.
This solution which has already been deployed and successfully tested at Afriland First Bank is expected to be adopted by private companies, government ministries, universities and the likes of national examination boards in a bid to overcome the painstaking and time consuming exercise of manually signing or affixing scan signatures to huge volumes of documents.
These digital signatures, which are fraud-proof have the same legal standing as handwritten signatures, in accordance with article 17 of the 21 December, 2010 Law relating to Cybersecurity and Cybercrime in Cameroon.
