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Thomas27568209ysc2
Participant
December 19, 2022
Answered

Slow validation of signatures

  • December 19, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 4513 views

Validating a PDF document in Acrobat signed through Docusign, even if only one signature, takes between 20 and 30 seconds. Regardless of user, computer or site (we have 10 sites around the world), regardless if opening document from internal network or from home.

 

I cannot recall this behaviour from only two months ago, so something must have changed. By unticking "Verify signatures when the document is opened" at least it won't be a 30 second delay to open a PDF document, but we use signatures *a lot* and our users are annoyed (to put it mildly) and it's a hassle to teach everyone where to find and untick that box.

 

I first reached out to Docusign who basically said "Contact Adobe to see if this is expected behavior, if not, get back to us with more details for troubleshooting". 

 

So - Is it expected behavior with 20-30 seconds to validate a signature? 

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Thomas27568209ysc2

This indeed may be a problem related to anti-malware suites. Please try and ask your IT department to allow you to temporarily switch the suite off. Then test the lengthy operations with the suite in off mode.


Hi,

It looks like the issue is connected with the installed anti-malware, Trend Micro Security Agent.

When we turned off the malware protection, the signature validation was done almost instantly.

As we are going to move to another anti-malware supplier in the near future, I won't pursue a solution with Trend; but at least we can conclude there are no issues either with Adobe Acrobat or Docusign.

1 reply

MikelKlink
MikelKlink
Participating Frequently
December 19, 2022

Long validation times usually are due to slow retrieval of revocation information. i.e. the OCSP responder or CRL download site of the PKI of Docusign certificates are very slow or the CRL in question is very large.

Can you share an example file for analysis?

T
Thomas27568209ysc2Author
Participant
December 20, 2022

Hi, absolutely; attaching a simple 1-page document with a Docusigned signature.

Just tested validating now: 31 seconds.

T
Thomas27568209ysc2Author
Participant
December 22, 2022

Thanks for providing the test file.
I opened it in Adobe Acrobat for the first time on my computer and it took not more than 2 seconds.

Also the revocation tab shows for all non-root and non-trust-anchor certificates that the positive check has been executed using CRLs embedded in the document. Therefore, that signature also shows as "LTV-enabled", so during validation Acrobat did not have to execute an online request at all.

My Acrobat configuration is a pretty standard one. Do you have any changes in your Acrobat validation configuration? For example, do you require a secure time for verification? Or do you always validate at current time? Or do you ignore in-document validation information?


Hi, thanks - I should of course have tested it on a non-company computer first to see if the behaviour is consistent in different IT environments, my bad.

Testing on a personal client, there's no delay issues at all with signature validations, so this definitely pointing to issues with profile settings in our Windows environment.

We should have standard Adobe reader installations; a few persons use Acrobat and there are som others using other Adobe software, but we haven't, at least not deliberately, changed anything from standard, and we don't have any specific requirements for verification - just basically open the document and the PDF verification process does it's thing to get the "Signed and all signatures are vlaidated" information message.

Any suggestions on where I should start looking for settings or similar that may explain the delay in getting signatures verified?

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