Signing with apple id

Question

I am new to acrobat 9...
I am trying File, Save As certified document....for a document I send to clients.  It is not exactly top secret material, but it seems to me the certifying has advantages.  I don't want to buy a certifiecation from adobe parters, so I ma using the apple certification.
But, when I open the document, I get the message below, which to me would look bad to clients seeing it (I would rather send in uncertified that have that message).  How do I get rid of these types of messages?
Above the document it says:
“The validity of the document certification in UNKNOWN.  The author could not be verified.”
Thanks
bob

Answer 1

Hi Bob,
The PKI universe (which is where digital signatures reside) is a complex place. There are a lot of little pieces that have to be in place to get a digital signature to be valid. The first thing is a certificate in the signature chain has to be designated as a trust anchor. Without trust nothing else happens. The key here is trust must be granted by the verifier (in this case, your customer), it is not something that can be imbued in the signature by the signer (in this case, you). Acrobat (and when I say Acrobat I really mean both Acrobat and Reader) looks to see if a certificate in the chain has been trusted by checking in both the Acrobat Address Book (Manage Trusted Identities list) and the Windows Certificate Store (if the preference is selected). At this time we are not checking in the Mac Keychain for trust, although you can sign with a digital ID located in the Mac Keychain (beginning with Acrobat 9).
Once trust has been established the next thing Acrobat has to do is check the validity of each certificate in the signing chain. One part of this validity check is revocation checking, but if you are using a certificate that does not provide for a means to do revocation checking the signature will come up in the Unknown state. You can get around this by deselecting the preference to require revocation checking, but every one of your clients would have to do this as well as it is on by default.
Your best bet is to procure a digital ID issued by one of our CDS partners. You can start at http://www.adobe.com/security/partners_cds.html if you want to learn more.
Steve