Establish Trust with a Root Certificate in Adobe

Adobe has a stringent requirement called the Adobe Approved Trusted List (AATL), which allows Certificate Authority vendors and partners to become trusted by default. As mentioned before, Proof used IdenTrust, which is part of AATL, however, certificates issued to individual notaries are not necessarily included in the AATL program.

If your document is missing the green checkmark in Adobe or you're receiving an error message (such as "At least one signature has problems"), don't worry! This does not mean the integrity of tamper sealing the documents by Proof is compromised or flawed. It simply means the document was notarized by a notary without a Proof Digital Certificate; the steps below should solve the issue.

Once the process below is completed, you can Verify the Digital Certificate for a Notarized Document.

Establish Trust with Adobe

For a relying party — e.g., county clerk, courthouse, state agency — to independently verify the validity of a IdenTrust Root Certificate, they must first install a file in their Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat desktop software. This file creates a trust relationship between the PDF reading tool and the IdenTrust Root Certificate, which enables Adobe to issue the green checkmark if the digital certificate is valid.

Adobe Reader and Acrobat requires one-time trusting of the IdenTrust Root certificate. This can be accomplished by installing the IdenTrust-provided .fdf file on the computer to verify notarized documents.

  1. Download the file at the bottom of this article.
  2. Open Adobe Preferences.
    adobe acrobat preferences establish trust.png
  3. Click Signatures.
    adobe acrobat signatures.png
  4. Click More to under the Identities & Trusted Certificates section.
  5. Click Trusted Certificates.
  6. Click Import.
    adobe acrobat root establish trust.jpg
  7. Click Browse.
    adobe acrobat establish trust browse.jpg
  8. Find and select the file igcdeviceca2fullchain_0.p7b (downloaded from the bottom of this article) from your local drive, and click Open.
  9. Select the first IdenTrust Global Common Root CA 1 contact under Contacts.
  10. Select the IdenTrust Global Common Root CA 1 certificate under Certificates.
  11. Click Trust.
    adobe acrobat root certificate import contacts.jpg
  12. Check the box next to Use this certificate as a trusted root.
    adobe acrobat root establish trust checkbox.jpg
  13. Click OK.
  14. Repeat steps 6 to 9 for the second IdenTrust Global Common Root CA 1 contact.
    adobe acrobat root trust second contact.png
  15. Click Import.

Once the process above is completed, you can Verify the Digital Certificate for a Notarized Document.

Attachments

Was this article helpful?

2 out of 4 found this helpful