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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:16:53 ADT
Jim Gillogly (jim@mentat.com)
Mon, 6 Apr 98 16:45:23 PDT
Hal said:
> >At the IETF meeting last week, there was a rumor going around of a
> >patent which would cover ElGamal signatures (but supposedly not DSS).
> >No details were available, however, and I haven't heard anything more
> >about it.
Ulf responded:
> It's the other way round. Schnorr claims that DSS is covered by his
> patent (on the other hand, knowledgeable sources say it covers nothing
> but the Schnorr algorithm implemented on chip cards). There is also a
> DSS patent assigned to the US government which is available
> royalty-free.
Perhaps it's both then, since Hal is right about the rumor. At the
IETF S/MIME working group meeting on 30 Mar it was announced in
suitably friend-of-a-friend third person terms that some variants of
the ANSI X9.42 Diffie-Hellman (aka ElGamal) scheme had had patents
applied for by an unnamed company or companies. The S/MIME WG was
going to draft a letter to various companies describing the proposed
use of D-H and requesting that they disclose any pending patents that
they felt were relevant. At the OpenPGP working group meeting on 1 Apr
Paul Hoffman of Internet Mail Consortium and S/MIME WG indicated that
(a) he didn't really know who the companies were, but (b) he expected
to have a definitive reading on the patent problems within a few days.
Jim Gillogly
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:16:53 ADT