[phrz]

The ESIGN Act makes no distinction in the US between whether you cryptographically sign or digitally draw, etc., defining a signature as "an electronic sound, symbol, or process, attached to or logically associated with a contract or other record and executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record."

[kjetil]

In the EU (and EEA), eIDAS distinguishes between

- "electronic signatures", which can be any electronic data used to sign, like a drawn signature - "advanced electronic signature" (AdES), usually a type of digital signature (XML-DSig, PDF signature, etc.) - "qualified electronic signature (QES), which is a digital signature created by a certified signature device

QES is legally equivalent to a "wet signature", but in my experience rarely used because of cost. AdES is much more common for high-trust scenarios like loan applications. For low-trust like package delivery, a signature (or smiley) drawn on a touch device will usually do.

[dfox]

AdES is mostly an technical standard that specifies how to use existing PKCS and IETF standards to produce eIDAS conforming signature, timestamp or “seal” (ie. timestamped signature) and how that should be mapped onto CMS (CAdES), XML-Signature (XAdES) and PDF (PAdES). How legally binding the result of that process is then depends on things like QSCTs, their LoA used in that and such things. And then there are various carveouts, for example in CZ, you can just generate CSR with ‘openssl req’ get that signed by right CA and produce QESs with that (and assume all the risks inherent in doing that)