Collabora announces that it has integrated timestamping and digital signing into LibreOffice and these features will be available with the launch of the 4.5 branch.

PDF digital signing and timestamping is used by numerous companies and governments to ensure the security of information transmitted with this kind of documents. Having these features available in open source projects is a very important step forward and Collabora has helped with their integration in LibreOffice 4.5.

Collabora also helped with the integration of certificate signing of PDF files for LibreOffice 4.4, a version of the office suite which has been heralded as the best one released so far. Certificate signing guarantees a document’s origin and authenticity which, in collaboration with the new features that have been announced, makes LibreOffice a good solution that can be used in various legal purposes.

LibreOffice 4.5 promises to be an interesting release

Surprisingly enough, the implementation of timestamping and digital signing was commissioned by the Swiss non-profit Wilhelm Tux, after it managed to get all the necessary funds in a crowdfunding campaign at the end of last year and the developers moved pretty fast.

"The signatures that are produced are interoperable with all PDF readers supporting the PDF/A standard, including products from Adobe. The signing process makes use of certificates and cryptography native to the operating system used, with Windows versions of LibreOffice using Microsoft’s included certificate manager. Mac and Linux versions include the NSS cryptographic library shared by Mozilla Firefox. Industry standard x.509 certificates are used for signing documents, and can be obtained from a wide range of certificate authorities," reads the Collabora announcement.

There is no release date for LibreOffice 4.5 set just yet, but it's likely that the features integrated by Collabora will only be a very small part of the final version that will be made available for download.