[from Gregory Aharonian's Internet Patent News Service] A hostile response to a tentative agreement to settle a patent dispute over the proposed Digital Signature Standard has forced the National Institute of Standards and Technology to return to negotiations. Last summer, NIST officials thought they finally settled the DSS public key patent dispute by granting Public Key Partners (PKP) of Sunnyvale, California, an exclusive worldwide license for the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) on which the DSS is built. In exchange for sublicensing rights, the PKP group agreed to endorse NIST's DSS proposal. But F. Lynn McNulty, associate director for computer security with NIST's Computer System Laboratory, said a majority of potential DSS users balked at the deal. NIST published the settlement terms for comment, and McNulty said all but 10 of the 270 comments were critical. [as many of you may remember, EFF coordinated the transmission of these comments to NIST, who did not widely announce the request for comment at all. The uncharitable might call that an attempt to sweep the matter under the rug. The naive might call it an oversight. At any rate almost all of the comments NIST received were routed via EFF, who were happy to publicize it "for" NIST.] Many DSS critics have argued that another algorithm promulgated by RSA Data Security (Redwood City, CA), is a de facto industry digital signature standard and that it would cost too much to comply with a separate government standard. Now NIST is attempting to hammer out a new settlement based on the comments, McNulty said. "The real hang-up continues to be the patent issue", McNulty said. "We're still trying to resolve it". Scientists at CSL designed the CSS to serve as a standard agency tool for verifying the senders and contents of messages transmitted electronically. CSL also prescribed the public key Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA). But PKP, which holds the rights to public key patents on behalf of Stanford University, MIT, and most recently, German professor Claus Schnorr, charged that CSL's proposed algorithm infringed upon these patents. NIST originally sponsored DSA research, and agencies are exempt from any licensing fees. PKP, however, has maintained that vendors that incorporate the standard into their products should pay royalties. [Government Computer News 1/24/94, 58] -- Stanton McCandlish * mech@eff.org * Electronic Frontier Found. OnlineActivist F O R M O R E I N F O, E - M A I L T O: I N F O @ E F F . O R G O P E N P L A T F O R M O N L I N E R I G H T S V I R T U A L C U L T U R E C R Y P T O