---
id: "hardman-signing-doesnt-always-claim-authorship"
type: "paper"
type_label: "Papers and paper collections"
title: "Signing Doesn’t Always Claim Authorship"
maintainer: "Daniel Hardman"
authors:
  - "Daniel Hardman"
date: "2026-02-07"
year: 2026
reading_level: "intro"
reading_level_label: "Introductory"
reading_level_meaning: "no prior knowledge of the suite"
evidence: "informative"
evidence_meaning: "an author's paper, deck, tutorial or post explaining the suite"
status: "quiet"
status_meaning: "no change in six to eighteen months; still correct"
access: "public"
access_meaning: "anyone with the link"
topics:
  - "theory"
roles:
  - "researcher"
source_url: "https://dhh1128.github.io/papers/sign-author.html"
source_license: null
source_license_note: null
found_on: "hardman-papers"
kerisse_credit: false
abstract_license: "CC BY 4.0"
abstract_license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
abstract_attribution: "KSKB, the KERISuite Knowledge Base (https://kskb.dev/)"
last_checked: "2026-10-15"
kskb_url: "https://kskb.dev/cards/hardman-signing-doesnt-always-claim-authorship/"
kskb_app_url: "https://kskb.dev/#item/hardman-signing-doesnt-always-claim-authorship"
kskb_record_url: "https://kskb.dev/data/kskb/resources/hardman-signing-doesnt-always-claim-authorship"
kskb_markdown_url: "https://kskb.dev/export/cards/hardman-signing-doesnt-always-claim-authorship.md"
---

# Signing Doesn’t Always Claim Authorship

A short 2026 analysis by Daniel Hardman questioning the assumption, common in decentralized identity, that a digital signature claims authorship. It gives everyday counterexamples, sets out what a digital signature does and does not prove, and draws a practical lesson for specifications and verifiers.

Labels: reading level Introductory; evidence informative (an author's paper, deck, tutorial or post explaining the suite).
Source: https://dhh1128.github.io/papers/sign-author.html (license not recorded).
The abstract is KSKB's own text under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/; credit KSKB, the KERISuite Knowledge Base (https://kskb.dev/).