First, the ViaCrypt version: I realize that it is legal. It's also very expensive when compared to the price of email readers/composers that people normally use (often weighing in at about $50 / seat). A $200 add-on is not likely to be universally accepted. It's as if somebody had patented car door locks and claimed that $40,000 was a reasonable price to have them included on a $10,000 car. I'm not complaining about the price; people can charge whatever they want for their products. However it does seem kind of high, creating market pressure... that market pressure surfaces in messages like this one and hopefully someday competing products from somebody. Perry Metzger:
All are patented in so far as one of the patents covers ALL public key schemes. Some, like Rabin's scheme, have possible technical advantages over RSA.
I am just beginning to study the mathematics behind public key crypto (got Simmons's _Contemporary Cryptology_ from the library this morning), but I haven't seen anything about what exactly this means (that is, I haven't been able to "look it up"). I was under the impression that many people participated in the development of P.K.Crypto... how can somebody patent all of their work? Don't these kind of patents apply only to specific algorithms? Begging the indulgence of this list, two more questions: * is there a reference I can read that covers the scope of public key crypto patents? * in broad terms, what would I have to do to develop an algorithm that works from a user's perspective like p.k.c. (ie public/private keys, the central functional point of all the wonderful schemes based on pkc) but doesn't violate patents? Thanks! derek