Fighting Clipper III

[Mark M.]

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On Thu, 3 Oct 1996, Jim McCoy wrote:

> Declan McCullagh <declan at eff.org> writes:
> >You'll have trouble doing a successful boycott of RSA. What, you won't
> >use Netscape Navigator or PGP?
> 
> Actually RSA is not a hard target for people like us to threaten.  The
> Diffie-Hellman patent expires in 210 days.  Cylink is prevented from taking
> legal action against anyone for violating this patent while the current
> lawsuit is being decided.  When Diffie-Hellman expires ElGamal is available
> for use for free.  So the best threat one can make against RSA is to directly
> challenge their revenue stream: start working on making ElGamal an available
> option in all systems which use RSA.

Rabin public-key encryption will also be free when the D-H patent expires.
This has the big advantage that it can use current RSA keys as long as the
keys use blum integers (PGP does, I think).  Breaking Rabin is provably as
difficult as factoring.

Mark
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