Well, S/MIME's misery may be OpenPGP's misery as well. It would be good if
someone who understands the patents and the D-H variants looks over the
message below and determines whether it also applies to the ElGamal used in
OpenPGP.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium
X-Lotus-FromDomain: CERTICOM
From: "Paul Lambert" <plambert(_at_)certicom(_dot_)com>
To: Russ Housley <housley(_at_)spyrus(_dot_)com>
cc: ietf-smime(_at_)imc(_dot_)org, djohnson(_at_)certicom(_dot_)ca,
plambert(_at_)certicom(_dot_)ca,
jis(_at_)mit(_dot_)edu
Date: Thu, 9 Jul 1998 14:43:25 -0700
Subject: Re: Patents and draft-ietf-smime-x942-00.txt
Sender: owner-ietf-smime(_at_)imc(_dot_)org
Russ,
Does anyone, especially anyone from Certicom, have any additional
information on this topic?
Yes, the IEEE patent statement is an accurate description of Certicom's
currently issued and pending patents applicable to IEEE 1363. Some of the
pending patents apply to X9.42.
Regards,
Paul A. Lambert
VP of Product Management
Certicom Corp.
San Mateo California
(650) 312-7996
Russ Housley <housley(_at_)spyrus(_dot_)com> on 07/09/98 02:05:52 PM
To: ietf-smime(_at_)imc(_dot_)org
cc: djohnson(_at_)certicom(_dot_)ca, plambert(_at_)certicom(_dot_)ca,
jis(_at_)mit(_dot_)edu (bcc: Paul
Lambert/Certicom)
Subject: Re: Patents and draft-ietf-smime-x942-00.txt
All:
At the recent IEEE P1363 meeting a letter from Certicom was circulated that
claimed patent protection on a number of techniques in the P1363 standard.
X9.42 and P1363 are very highly aligned in the area of Diffie-Hellman. One
of these techniques is Public Key Validation, which is described in Section
2.1.5 of draft-ietf-smime-x942-00.txt.
A copy of the letter can be found at:
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/1363/letters/Certicom.txt
Does anyone, especially anyone from Certicom, have any additional
information on this topic?
Russ
From: housley(_at_)spyrus(_dot_)com
Sent: Friday, June 19, 1998 3:52 PM
To: ietf-smime(_at_)imc(_dot_)org
Cc: djohnson(_at_)certicom(_dot_)ca; plambert(_at_)certicom(_dot_)com;
jis(_at_)mit(_dot_)edu;
bfox(_at_)microsoft(_dot_)com; paulv(_at_)entrust(_dot_)com;
whitfield_diffie(_at_)eng(_dot_)sun(_dot_)com;
cme(_at_)clark(_dot_)net; jon(_at_)callas(_dot_)org;
cadams(_at_)entrust(_dot_)com
Subject: Patents and draft-ietf-smime-x942-00.txt
All:
The Internet-Draft draft-ietf-smime-x942-00.txt specified on of the
variants fron the ANSI X9.42 Draft Standad. This vairant of
Diffie-Hellman
seems to be clear of IBM's pending patent.
At this point, I waould like all S/MIME WG members to determine if there
are any other potential patents (pending or otherwise) that might impact
the use of the Diffie-Hellman variant specified in
draft-ietf-smime-x942-00.txt. At this point I am unaware of any, and
this
query is to avoid any rude surprises.
Please forward this note to anyone who might offer assistance in the
quick
resolution of this matter.
Russ
S/MIME WG Chair
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium