ECC patents?

Alexander Klimov alserkli at inbox.ru
Mon Sep 12 04:58:14 EDT 2005


On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, Ben Laurie wrote:

> Alexander Klimov wrote:
> > ECC is known since 1985 but seems to be absent in popular free
> > software packages, e.g., neither gnupg nor openssl has it (even if the
> > relevant patches were created). It looks like the main reason is some
> > patent uncertainty in this area.
>
> I don't, but it is not the case that OpenSSL does not include ECC.

You are absolutely right the Sun patch was finally accepted,
although there were some patent-related discussions, e.g., at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/10/msg00100.html
There is also work on ECC for gnupg
http://www.g10code.de/tasklist.html#gcrypt-ecc
and again there were patent-related discussions about the issue. ECC
is also implemented in crypto++ and other libraries.

But (potential) problem still persists: even if openssl implements ECC
it does not save you from patent issues if they exist.

-- 
Regards,
ASK

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