At 03:00 PM 3/9/96 -0500, Perry wrote:

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I'm curious, because in the past, as I understand things, RSA has said that the DH patent covers El Gamal. If RSA no longer considers DH to be a valid patent, that would mean El Gamal is not patent encumbered. It all matters very little to me, as the patents expire next year.

Yeah, but that's still a year and a half till they're gone. Having them gone now (for some relatively small value of "now") would be especially pleasant, because we can start totally ignoring them (except for the RSA and Schnorr patents) rather than mostly ignoring them. Unfortunately, the somebody-at-Siemens-in-Paderborn patent on using Diffie-Hellman with hashed shared secrets for authentication is (minimally) good until something like 1994+17, even though it's so obvious to the skilled practitioner that I thought of it independently myself. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 pager 408-787-1281 # "At year's end, however, new government limits on Internet access threatened # to halt the growth of Internet use. [...] Government control of news media # generally continues to depend on self-censorship to regulate political and # social content, but the authorities also consistently penalize those who # exceed the permissable." - US government statement on China...