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

Phillip Hallam-Baker hallam at gmail.com
Tue Nov 26 13:00:24 EST 2013


On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 1:49 AM, Viktor Dukhovni
<cryptography at dukhovni.org>wrote:

> 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.
>

I did rather worry when I saw the Plaintiff's counsel's line of
questioning. It is the sort of thing that can be really damaging.

I have been in the same situation (only over the invention of Web Mail
which is rather less consequential than Public Key Crypto). And the result
was I ended up as a paid witness for that very specific part of the case
rather than an expert witness explaining email technology in general.

-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20131126/bc0f95b0/attachment.html>


More information about the cryptography mailing list