-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Bill Stewart wrote:
Every time you say RC4 without saying "Trademark of some bunch of lawyer scum" you theoretically break the lawyer made law. So let us stop doing it. Serve them right.
You can always call it "Ron's Code 4" or "Rivest's Code 4" or whatever.
Bah. I don't think there's much RSA can do, esp. if you use a homegrown implementation. If someone says "A stream cipher compatible with RSA's RC4 (tm)" then what is RSA going to do? It'd be funny if the next time somebody hacks a proprietary code, if they make some changes, redo the key schedule, perhaps in mind of strengthening the algorithm, and then post it to sci.crypt as "hey, I got this idea for a new crypto algorithm... what do you think?". If the algorithm is different enough from the proprietary code version, with no clear connection between them, and the author can give full design rationale as if s/he wrote it from scratch, then what's a company to do? (If the practice of secret/proprietary algorithms continues for the long term future then it's quite possible a genuine coincidence like this will occur... RC4 [officially secret] and RC5 [not officially secret] are some very simply constructed algorithms... what's to say another skilled cryptographer could not have reinvented the wheel?) - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBMTPauioZzwIn1bdtAQGR9QGAkRVkH2PZFk2LShKcBqGoWJTDkLX87sBL Uc4bo2ksl47YEXQ2slL238auZVLBFCC8 =D1/4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----