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From: Paulo Barreto <paulo(_dot_)barreto(_at_)unitools(_dot_)com(_dot_)br>
To: Rich Ankney <rankney(_at_)erols(_dot_)com>;
ietf-open-pgp(_at_)imc(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: Subject: Re: Legal issues in implementing OpenPGP
Date: Tuesday, May 05, 1998 3:39 PM
At 01:00 PM 98/05/05 -0400, Rich Ankney wrote:
Hitachi claims to have a patent covering SHA1.
This seems rather odd. Is it on a particular hardware implementation
of SHA1? Do you have a patent number for this?
No, but you could look up the IBM patent server. The Hitachi patent was
mentioned in a thread of the P1363 discussion list. I'll notify you if I
discover the patent number and/or its exact claims.
I don't think it ever went to court, but no one seems to be getting sued
for using DSA...
So it was settled before going to court; someone (possibly Schnorr
himself,
but I'm not sure) did raise the issue of patent coverage
(unsuccessfully).
I don't think there was ever any lawsuit (i.e. RSADSI never sued
anyone). So I wouldn't say it is settled yet. OTOH, in te US,
Schnorr is claiming infringement on a dependent claim (vs. an
independent claim), which seems a little weak. Of course
IANAL.
ECDSA in particular is not patented. Certicom has patented various
hardware tricks to implement EC over GF(2^m). Certicom also has
a patent on the MQV variant of Diffie-Hellman which can be used over
EC, but has granted a royalty-free license for its use.
I wouldn't be so sure about this. A fully compliant implementation must
support point compression, and Certicom has filed a patent on this.
As for the royalty-free license, Don Johnson of Certicom sent me personal
mail saying that there is a "small" fee to be paid for the set of
Certicom
patents (one dollar per copy of the product using any of them). This
includes the MQV scheme.
This is a change from what I thought I heard. Oh well.
Cheers,
Paulo barreto.
Thanks,
Rich