[libreoffice-users] Re: Question about signed documents

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.



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