Sign with the token
already in your hand.
A DSC USB token, or any certificate in your Windows store. PAdES, SHA-256, detached CAdES — the standard the MCA, the Income Tax portal and GeM all expect. The private key never leaves the token, and it never crosses into the process that parsed your document.
Certificate
Sign into
Countersigning without breaking the first signature.
A form with two signatories is the ordinary case in Indian company filing, and it is where PDF tools quietly fail. The first signature covers the file as it stood; anything that rewrites the file invalidates it.
THE COMMON BEHAVIOUR
Rewrite the whole document. The second signature is valid. The first now covers bytes that are no longer there, so every reader reports the document as altered after signing.
You signed it. Now it reads as tampered with.
WHAT THIS APPLICATION DOES
Append, and prove the prefix. The output begins with the input byte for byte — that is checked, not assumed — and the new signature is added after it. The first signature still covers exactly what it covered.
This is the one place the single-revision rule is deliberately broken, and the run says so when it happens.
Green does not mean “this file is fine”.
A signature can verify perfectly over bytes that are no longer the whole document. Somebody appends a page after signing and the original signature is still mathematically intact — it just no longer says anything about what was added. Most tools show that as valid.
At least one intact signature covers the document as it now stands. The command line exits 0.
Every signature verifies, and none of them covers the file as it now stands: content was added after the last one. The command line exits 1, so a script that gates on the exit code refuses it. Signed version writes out the bytes that were actually signed.
The document changed after signing, or was never signed by the certificate it names.
A legitimately countersigned document stays green: earlier signatures covering earlier revisions is normal, and calling that tampering would be the same mistake in the other direction.
The timestamp, and nothing else.
A signature carries the signer’s own clock unless you ask a time authority to attest the hour. That request is the single exception to everything else on this site, so it is described in full rather than in a footnote.
WHAT IS SENT
An RFC 3161 timestamp query: a cryptographic hash of your signature. Not the document, not its name, not any part of its contents. No cookies, no redirects, a twenty-second limit.
WHEN
Only when you tick the box, and only after you pick an authority — the field arrives empty, because a default would mean we chose a company on your behalf and then told you that you had.
It runs in its own short-lived process, and it is the only code we wrote that opens a network connection. Revocation is deliberately never checked: that would mean asking the issuing authority, over the network, every time you opened a signed document.
One of forty-three commands.
creasepoint sign filing.pdf --thumbprint A1B2C3… --field sigfield2 --visible --out signed.pdf
signed into "sigfield2" -> signed.pdf 1.02 MB
signer CN=ARAFATH HASHMI SHAIK, ...
standard PAdES (ETSI.CAdES.detached), SHA-256, RSA
timestamp none - the signature carries the signer's clock only
carries 2 signature(s), as the worker reads it back
revisions 2 - the earlier ones are the document as it was signed, kept
byte for byte, which is what lets the earlier signatures still verifyEvery command prints what it did to the signatures its input carried, whether or not you asked. A rewrite that drops one says so on the line after it happens.