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