PK patents

[whitfield.diffie at Eng.Sun.COM]

> I forget if your name is on any patents.

    My name is on the exponential key exchange patent (4,200,770).  I
wasn't much involved in the filing process and the for all that it
pays me royalties and is of commercial significance, I didn't pay a
lot of attention to it.

    I can believe someone might write an entertaining article called
the ``The Public Key Patent Squabble,'' but I have no interest at
all in doing so.  What exactly do you think I should have included?

> I understand that the NSA tried to deny the RSA patent . . .
> Do you know anything about what I'm talking about?

    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
subject of litigation and it must have to be very careful about
following its own procedures.

    There was an interference between the RSA patent and the
Pohlig-Hellman patent, which is the reason RSA didn't issue till '83.

> I'm very concerned about some anomalies on the cypherpunk list.
> Are you on it?

    Yes.  Is that irregular or are you referring to something I
haven't noticed?

> In particular some messages you may have traded with T.C. May have
> shown up lately and I'm a bit suspicious of some irregularities.

    That's because, as discussed one of Tim's messages yesterday, I
normally send comments only to the people who posted and leave it to
them to repost to the whole list if they think what I said is
worthwhile.  Like Tim, I have noticed that the list is cluttered with
multiple responses to the same question.
						Whit