Security & legality

What the Electronic Signature Law provides

Israel’s Electronic Signature Law, 2001 sets a simple principle: a document may not be denied admissibility as evidence merely because it was signed electronically. Israeli courts approach electronic signatures through evidentiary questions — the signer’s identity, their intent to sign, and the document’s integrity — not through the question of whether ink was involved.

The law also defines statutory tiers that rely on an external certification authority. BasmaSign does not claim those tiers, and will not phrase itself as if it did: the product is an admissible electronic signature whose strength is the evidence gathered around it. Documents for which the law prescribes a special form — wills, for instance — are not suited to electronic signing, with us or with any provider.

What gives a signature its practical force

When a signature is examined, the questions are always the same: who signed, what was put before them, when they signed, and whether the document in hand is the one that was signed. The platform is built so each of those questions has a recorded answer — not an after-the-fact reconstruction, but a record written at the moment the event happened.

A formal legal opinion on the admissibility of documents signed on the platform will be published on this page — free. We consider such an opinion part of the product, not a product sold separately.

The evidence pack: what gets recorded

Every document accrues an event record that cannot be altered — not edited, not deleted, not even by us:

• Sending — when the document went out, to which number, over which channel.
• Viewing — when the document was opened and from what device.
• Verification — the one-time code verified, when, and against which phone number.
• Signing — the moment of signature and the exact content signed.
• Delivery — when the signed copy reached each side.

The pack presents as one whole beside the signed document, ready to produce in any dispute.

The digital seal — and what it is not

Once all signatures are in, the document is locked with a cryptographic seal to the PAdES standard, embedded in the PDF itself. From that moment, any change to the document — one character, one pixel — breaks the seal in a way any PDF software detects.

In full transparency: the seal is made with BasmaSign’s organisational certificate, and it attests to two things — that the document went through our recorded signing process, and that it has not changed since. It is not the signer’s personal certificate; the signer’s identity is established by the evidence pack, not by the cryptographic seal. Many providers blur that distinction; we prefer to write it down.

Where documents live and what guards them

Documents are encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest, and stored in versioned, retention-locked cloud storage: a signed file cannot be replaced or overwritten. Every account is isolated from every other at every layer of the platform, and every access is logged. We are subject to that logging too — a principle we intend to turn into a transparency page of its own.

Privacy and the legal frame

The platform operates under Israel’s Privacy Protection Law, and our Privacy Policy details what is collected, why, for how long, and who the sub-processors are. The Terms of Service include a data processing agreement as an annex. All three documents are published in three languages, and all three versions are equally binding.