EU Trusted List Now Available in Adobe Acrobat!

Posted by John Jolliffe, European Government Relations Lead, and Andrea Valle, Senior Product Manager for Document Cloud

Note: This post first appeared on the Adobe Document Cloud blog.

Adobe’s recent announcement that it would be supporting EU Trust Lists within Acrobat and Acrobat Reader may not have made many headlines in policy circles, but it certainly deserves some attention as a significant contribution from the private sector to the EU’s Digital Single Market Strategy.

The EU adopted its new Regulation on Electronic identification (eID) and electronic Trust Services in July 2014, with the aim of creating a predictable legal framework for “Trust Services” including electronic signatures. But new rules alone can’t compel the creation of a more integrated single market. It is the actions that companies like Adobe take to implement new laws and their supporting standards into their services that give those laws their real world effect.

Adobe is delighted to announce the completion of our work to support and integrate the EU Trusted Lists (EUTL) into Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader. For the first time, citizens, governments and businesses across the world will have easy access to electronically signed documents based on EU qualified certificates in the ubiquitous Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader software.

The new EU Regulation 910/2014 on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market (eIDAS) will soon harmonize electronic signatures and identification of citizens and business. This new law will completely replace the individual signature legislation existing in all the EU member states by July 1, 2016.

Following the approval of the law on July 2014, Adobe has been working on the integration of the EUTL in Acrobat – as previously discussed in this blog post – and has released the feature in versions DC and XI. In these releases, you may have noticed a new user preference to manage the download of the European trusted list and its automatic update.

We have now published online the EUTL, which combines the certificates from the trusted lists published by the 28 EU Member States and 3 EEA Countries (Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway). Therefore, from now on, users of Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader can automatically validate digital signatures based on qualified certificates issued in Europe, and apply their own signatures knowing that the recipients can easily perform the validation.

Adobe has been a long-time supporter of digital signature technologies as a means of conducting secure transactions via electronic documents, and we are proud to be the first major software vendor to incorporate the EU Trusted Lists into globally available solutions.

The ability to sign and verify electronic documents in the standard PDF format with the ubiquitous Adobe Acrobat Reader software is a significant contribution to the creation of a connected digital single market in the European Union, one of the ten priorities from the President Jean-Claude Juncker.