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PKP is not going to go away when a few of its patents expire. Right. Contracts and licensing arrangements can last much longer than patents.

That's why it's so important to see the exact details of this latest deal and find out why someone in the federal bureaucracy was greasing the procurement skids.

I repeat -- NIST had no choice, because PKP held all the patent cards. Even if you don't believe PKP's claim to all of public-key cryptography, both the Diffie-Hellman and Schnorr patents would most likely be infringed by DSA. You can argue with the specifics of the deal -- and with what NIST gave away in order to get the Clipper exemption through -- but they had to reach some settlement. Btw -- the deal is *not* final; the announcement is just the start of a 60-day comment period. --Steve Bellovin