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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:25 ADT
Eric Young (eay@cryptsoft.com)
Thu, 16 Jul 1998 11:59:49 +1000 (EST)
On Tue, 14 Jul 1998, Vin McLellan wrote:
> RSA has its pitch. Certicom has its pitch. The List can parse the
....
> Certicom is a company of considerable talents (cryptographers as
> well as marketeers;-) But just as your competitors have to deal with the
> size advantages of 160-bit ECC (and patent claims of the sort Certicom has
> just lodged against X9.42, IEEE 1363, and the IETF's S/MIME,) Certicom has
And this in unfortunatly the way I see ECC. Ignoring the technical aspects of
it, and just looking at the political, ECC is going to be tied up with patents
in the USA for quite a long time to come. I have not been following the ECC
patents too closely, but Certicom is trying to become the patent holder of
what they will try to make the dominant PK system of the next decade.
RSA has 18 months to go before they loose their strangle hold on the USA
market. They will then have to rely on reputation and service. Certicom is
obviously going out to challenge that position.
ECC has technical merits, but in the face of patents and royalties, I
don't know how it will do in the market.
As an implementor, I'm not rushing to do ECC in my free software because it
will just be another set of patent violations that will be in my library
making life difficult for people in the USA. I will be interested to see what
restrictions end up for the ECC systems described in P1363.
eric
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:25 ADT