Diffie, via "L.": # No. But after all, the RSA patent was filed from MIT by people # (R, S, and A) that I didn't know well till much later. There may have # been some hankey pankey I didn't know about, but I certainly don't # recall the New York Times article you refer to. The statement that # ``They just got the application back rejected.'' Doesn't sound right # to me. I presume that the Patent Office has to state why an # application is returned. It's decisions, after all, are a constant All four of the PKP patents mentioned in RFC1423, Cryptographic Apparatus and Method ("Diffie-Hellman")............................... No. 4,200,770 Public Key Cryptographic Apparatus and Method ("Hellman-Merkle").................... No. 4,218,582 Cryptographic Communications System and Method ("RSA")................................... No. 4,405,829 Exponential Cryptographic Apparatus and Method ("Hellman-Pohlig").................... No. 4,424,414 had all of their claims either "rejected" or "objected to" on the first pass by the patent examiner. I have been told this is not unusual. The patent examiner gave reasonable technical reasons whe he rejected them. Nothing looks fishy to me, that is part of the record. I have a copy of [almost all of] the "full wrappers" on these four patents, and am making them available to the CA cypherpunks (CA, because I live here). (They're not online, there's a lot of handwritten pages & annotations & forms that would not OCR, and it's a 6" stack of legal paper, so it's not easy for me to provide them online, sorry.) strick