“Document sealing” refers to applying an electronic seal to a digital document to provide verifiable evidence of the document’s origin (the issuing organization) and integrity (no undetected changes). Unlike an electronic signature, which is typically linked to a natural person, document sealing is primarily used to attribute documents to a legal entity (e.g., a company or public authority) and to make tampering reliably detectable. Depending on the setup, sealing may also include time information (timestamps) and validation data for long-term evidentiary value.
Electronic Seal Creation: Applying an organizational seal to documents (e.g., PDF or XML), optionally with a visible seal appearance.
Certificate and Key Management: Managing seal certificates, keys, expiration dates, and role-based access controls.
Integrity Verification: Checking whether a document has been altered after sealing and presenting verification results.
Batch Sealing: Automated sealing of large volumes of documents, e.g., invoices, notices, or mass correspondence.
Automation and Workflows: Rule-based sealing triggered by events (e.g., approval, dispatch, archiving), including escalations.
Timestamp Integration: Adding (qualified or organizational) timestamps to provide provable sealing time.
Revocation Status Checks (CRL/OCSP): Validating whether the certificate was valid and not revoked at the time of sealing.
Long-Term Validation (LTV): Embedding or maintaining validation material so documents remain verifiable years later.
Audit Trail and Logging: Tamper-evident logging of who sealed which document and when, including reporting.
Interfaces and Integration: APIs/connectors for DMS/ECM, ERP, e-invoicing, email gateways, or line-of-business systems.
HSM or Cloud-Signing Integration: Using secure hardware (HSM) or centralized seal services for key protection and execution.
A company seals outgoing e-invoices (e.g., PDF/XML) so recipients can verify origin and integrity.
A public authority seals official notices before providing them via an online portal.
A DMS automatically seals archived records upon ingestion to make later changes detectable.
An HR system seals payroll documents before publishing them in an employee self-service portal.
A scanning workflow seals digitized inbound documents after indexing to “freeze” their captured state.