RSA has a patent on their algorithm. It's quite likely that I can't even create a key pair without their permission, let alone use it.
You're poorly informed. As a condition of a grant from DARPA to RSADSI, RSAREF may be used noncommercially, for free, to do any of the following: - RSA encryption and key generation, as defined by RSA Data Security's Public-Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS) [4] - MD2 and MD5 message digests [3,5,6] - DES (Data Encryption Standard) in cipher-block chaining mode [7,8] Moreover, I believe you'll find that RSADSI has become much more helpful recently. For more information, anonymous ftp to rsa.com and look around. I've just gone over the RSAREF license agreement again. It seems to permit any sort of not-for-profit operation, including a public key service. -- Marc Ringuette (mnr@cs.cmu.edu)