Adobe PDF Certification - Java

Question

I'm currently building a Java daemon that will need to be able to sign and certify PDF documents. Now I've already implemented the code for this, but there is one "little" problem.

The problem: The certificate I use needs to automatically be validated via Adobe Reader. To do this you need to make sure your certificate is used by a partner of Adobe. VeriSign offers a product called True Credentials for Adobe and it works out perfectly for what I need. The only problem is that it requires you to have a USB token (note: that might not be the EXACT usb token, but it's the same company) to use it. Well this Java daemon will run on servers in multiple locations, so having a USB key for the server isn't really an option.

The question: Does anyone know of a product/service that I can use to do this? This isn't a "programming" related question in terms of coding, but I'm writing an application that has a certain requirement that "maybe" another programmer has had and has solved. So that is why I'm asking it here.

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

After talking to a few of Adobes partners, apparently when they work with Adobe they're required by a policy to have the certificate stored on a hardware device.

I talked to GlobalSign and apparently one of their customers used the SDK of the company that made the USB keys to automate using the key on a server. So for anyone looking to do this and are not looking to pay 50k-75k for their hardware security module (HSM) and get their server software, this could be a possibility. The fact that I was told this by GlobalSign means that it's probably not against any terms of use but it's something you should look into if you're wanting to do this.