Increasing cyber attacks have led to mounting concern that unsecure government documents could be altered or falsified. To help counter these attacks, the National Information Security Center in Japan partnered with Adobe Acrobat to create support for electronic signatures using the Japanese Government Public Key Infrastructure (GPKI).

The main mission of NISC is to protect the government, but the organization’s other overall mission is to improve the entire security level of Japan. As the first step for protecting electronic documents, NISC implemented PDF as the standard format for electronic documents. “We prefer not to rely upon technology provided by one specific company, but we had no problems supporting the use of PDF files since they are the international standard ISO 32000-1,” says NISC.

NISC believed that the ideal solution would use the existing Japanese Government Public Key Infrastructure (GPKI) for handling certificates. Adobe formed a task force with NISC to work on support for GPKI and publish government official signatures to the Adobe Approved Trust List (AATL). This enables users of Adobe Acrobat X and Reader X to automatically and easily verify the electronic signatures of government officials on PDF files using the GPKI government official certificates.

“Thanks to cooperation from Adobe, we were able to effectively deploy GPKI, which enabled us to increase efficiency without raising costs,” says NISC. “With electronic signatures, we can thwart the intentions of attackers attempting to pull off spoofing attacks.”

Read more about this implementation here:

Akiko Yamamoto, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Acrobat Solutions

Instead of stacks of unwieldy paper documents, developers in the City of Sacramento are now submitting project documentation electronically with PDF for much easier review and distribution. By moving to a digital environment, the submittal, review, and approval process eliminates the need to output and handle thousands of pounds of unwieldy paper documents (some 13,000 building permit a year), saving time and money.

Using Adobe Acrobat Pro, engineers and developers can now submit plans electronically as a PDF. Since the staff will no long has to manually input information from the plans into the central database, electronic submissions decrease the possibility of introducing errors.

Even if only 25% of the plans are submitted in PDF, the Sacramento CDD estimates that it will save some 1,200 hours of labor previously used to receive, time-stamp, collate, and distribute documents. This time savings does not even include efficiencies associated with easier review, processing and archiving with the PDF files.

“Standardizing on Adobe Acrobat to simplify increasingly complex plan check reviews—involved in managing development projects—helps our agency make the City more economically competitive, resourceful, and vibrant,” says Matthew Sites, project manager, Community Development Department for the City of Sacramento.

To read more about how the City of Sacramento is using Adobe Acrobat, check out the full story here: http://adobe.ly/OmEiOH

Ali Hanyaloglu, senior marketing manager, Acrobat Solutions

Follow Ali on Twitter, @acroboy.