Digitally signing without saving locally

Hi,

The short answer is no. There is a good reason for the change in behavior though. One thing to keep in mind is a digital signature is a cryptographic operation and whenever the term "cryptographic operation" is bandied about you know it's an oblique reference to a security method.

At the heart of a digital signatures it provides two forms of security; proof of document integrity and proof of the signer's identity. With regard to the document integrity portion of the digital signature, it is based on a cryptographic digest of a specified byte range. When Acrobat (or Reader) computes the byte range it can either do it across the bits loaded in memory or across the bits loaded on disk.

Acrobat 6 and earlier would compute the digest over the bits in memory, which is faster, but leaves open a backdoor for someone (in this case the bad guy) to modify the bytes in memory just prior to the computation of the digest. Computing the digest across the bits on disk is a more secure method as it is much harder for someone to write to disk (because it would require a second save operation and that would clue you in that something is amiss). Thus, in the interest of protecting the signer from inadvertently signing something other than what they intended to sign we made the change to only sign a file that has been committed to disk. If there were no bad guys we could have kept the faster signing in memory operation, but alas...

Steve

Ok....guess there is no way around that.
In that case, is there a way to change the default location?