[Cryptography] Lawyer: "Are you familiar with public key encryption?" -- Whitfield Diffie: "Yes, I am"

[Viktor Dukhovni]

On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 12:17:31PM +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:

> Taking a bet on Whit Diffie, as the trial against "patent troll" TQP wraps up
> Monday.

Too bad they lost for now.

It seems to me (IANAL) that if TQP has a valid claim with SSL +
RC4 that is essentially based on RC4 being a stream cipher (the
SSL part seems irrelevant) then they'd have a valid claim on
Vigenere.  That prior art is 460 years old.

There I think no need to show that you need PKI to enable E-commerce,
and RC4 alone is not sufficient.  Even if symmetric crypto were
sufficient, there's nothing in TQP's claims that applies to RC4
alone that hasn't been known for nearly 500 years.

It is rather sad that TQP is getting away with this.

-- 
	Viktor.