(1) Engineering work which must be sealed under the provisions of Chapter 471, F.S., stored or transmitted in an electronic format, shall be signed, dated and sealed by the professional engineer in responsible charge.(2) A license holder may use a computer generated representation of his or her seal on electronically conveyed work; however, the final hard copy documents of such engineering work must contain an original signature of the license holder and date or the documents must be accompanied by an electronic signature as described in this section. A scanned image of an original signature shall not be used in lieu of an original signature or electronic signature. Engineering work that contains a computer generated seal shall be accompanied by the following text or similar wording: “The seal appearing on this document was authorized by [Example: Leslie H. Doe, P.E. 0112 on (date)]” unless accompanied by an electronic signature as described in this section.
(3) An electronic signature is a digital authentication process attached to or logically associated with an electronic document and shall carry the same weight, authority, and effect as an original signature. The electronic signature, which can be generated by using either public key infrastructure or signature dynamics technology, must be as follows:
(a) Unique to the person using it;
(B) Capable of verification;
© Under the sole control of the person using it;
(d) Linked to a document in such a manner that the electronic signature is invalidated if any data in the document are changed.
(4) Alternatively, electronic files may be signed and sealed by creating a “signature” file that contains the engineer’s name and PE number, a brief overall description of the engineering documents, and a list of the electronic files to be sealed. Each file in the list shall be identified by its file name utilizing relative Uniform Resource Locators (URL) syntax described in the Internet Architecture Board’s Request for Comments (RFC) 1738, December 1994, which is hereby adopted and incorporated by reference by the Board and can be obtained from the Internet Website:
ftp://ftp.isi. edu/ in-notes/rfc1738.txt. Each file shall have an authentication code defined as an SHA-1 message digest described in Federal Information Processing Standard Publication 180-1 “Secure Hash Standard,” 1995 April 17, which is hereby adopted and incorporated by reference by the Board and can be obtained from the Internet Website:
http://www.itl.nist.gov./div897/pubs/fip180-1.htm. A report shall be created that contains the engineer’s
name and PE number, a brief overall description of the engineering documents in question and the authentication code of the signature file. This report shall be printed and manually signed, dated, and sealed by the professional engineer in responsible charge. The signature file is defined as sealed if its authentication code matches the authentication code on the printed, manually signed, dated and sealed report. Each electronic file listed in a sealed signature file is defined as sealed if the listed authentication
code matches the file’s computed authentication code.
