Document signing in LibreOffice revisited: What is absent from this conversation is the fact that one needs a certificate that is anchored to a well-known certificate authority in order for a random other person to verify the signature. And such certificate does not come automatically with a LibreOffice install. In fact, to my best knowledge, there are no free certificate providers anymore that are generally trusted. E.g. when you want to sign a PDF document (e.g. with LibreOffice Draw), the receiving end typically will use Adobe Acrobat Reader to verify the signature. The only libre work-around is to generate a self-signed certificate, then convince your receiving party to get the certificate via an independent, secure way of transmission and then have them install this self-signed certificate into their computer. Good luck with that. The only way I know of to get a (free as in beer) signature with a generally accepted certificate is HelloSign (their free plan allows for signing of 3 documents per month). Besides that, it is technically possible to convert e.g. a free Let's encrypt cert for document signing, but since Let's encrypt is not designed for document signing, these certs are not part of e.g. the cert list trusted by Adobe.
It is even more sad that even the method using self-signed certificates it is broken in LibreOffice (at least in a frequently used scenario: preinstalled LibreOffice under Ubuntu 18.04). Any GPG keys (or other certs) that are available on the system are not accessible when invoking the signing task from within LibreOffice. Under Ubuntu 18.04, LibreOffice invokes the Seahorse key manager, which starts but never gets populated with the available keys/certs (and also new key generation is dysfunctional in this somehow isolated environment). I am still trying to sign a single document with LibreOffice. Any help? Where can I change how OpenOffice invokes Seahorse (or for that matter any other certificate manager? The fact that this functionality is broken shows how few people really do sign their documents. I guess in the corporate setting, this is done more frequently, but NOT with LibreOffice. Sad, but true. -- Sent from: http://document-foundation-mail-archive.969070.n3.nabble.com/Users-f1639498.html -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
