What does XAdES mean?

The term XAdES stands for XML Advanced Electronic Signatures, which specifies a set of extensions that are used with the W3C recommendation for XML Signature Syntax and Processing (XML-DSig). XAdES specifies Advanced Electronic Signatures, technically implemented through digital signatures, in compliance with the eIDAS regulation. XAdES is suitable for signing electronic financial transactions and the XML data structure is human-readable and has all the necessary information to identify the signatory.

With the included signature (of all the data) and the certificates that have attested to the authenticity all of the (public) keys used, this is sufficiently verifiable such that the banking system will trust it and perform a (high-value) transaction. Ideally, the bank can consider that such a transaction will not be successfully repudiated.

Similar to PAdES, a resulting property of XAdES is that electronically signed documents can remain valid for long periods, even if underlying cryptographic algorithms are broken.

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