RAH wrote:

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FWIW, this is about going rate for RSA too, BTW. Was. RSA's patent has expired.

And ECC never has been and never can be patented. Some protocols and implementation methods are (just as they are for RSA etc.)

BTW, the only decent *software* ECC, FEE, is patented, by Apple.

Are you serious? So many holes... so little time... Let's see. Are you talking about software or about technology? Re: Software; I have never seen FEE software lauded. Apple uses an implementation of it in MacOS... other than that... uh...??? Re: Technology; Apples uses it is as a minor PR opportunity to claim that they are doing crypto research. The patent is an abusive one on trivia (see below). One day Crandall thought of using simple primes in ECC (like about 1000 other people) and patented it. NeXT used this as a PR opportunity to claim that they had developed it on purpose to avoid licensing RSA. They also said anybody could use FEE without licensing it. Then Apple bought NeXT. Dunno what their position is but it is irrelevant. FEE is bog standard ECC over prime fields, using primes of the form p = 2^d-c with small c such as 2^233-3. This makes reduction simpler and speeds up operations a bit. It is absolutely trivial to pick other simple primes not covered by the patent, such as p = 2^248-2^100-1. All of the NIST curves over prime fields are of this form, such as p = 2^224-2^96+1. Personally, I would avoid such special cases anyway. Regards, Rob. .-. .-. / \ .-. .-. / \ / \ / \ .-. _ .-. / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / `-' `-' \ / \ / \ \ / `-' `-' \ / `-' `-' _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]