Rijndael & Hitachi

[Vin McLellan]

         Arnold G. Reinhold <reinhold at world.std.com> asked:

 > What is the licensing status of the other finalists? For example, I seem 
to >recall reading that RC6 would be licensed to the public at no charge if 
it won
 > the competition. What now?

         Since April, RC6 has being commercially licensed as part of RSA's 
BSAFE Crypto-C 5.0 and BSAFE Crypto-J 3.0 software developer toolkits. I 
don't expect that will change.

         (RSA said, however, that by the end of the year its regular 
support and maintenance procedures will add Rijndael to both of those SDKs. 
RSA also said it will adopt the AES as "a baseline encryption algorithm" 
for its Keon family of digital cert products.)

         Given RSA's market share, the eight BSAFE toolkits could be a 
major channel for distributing AES code to the developer community, 
particularly among OEMs. <http://www.rsasecurity.com/products/bsafe/>

         Of the other three who made the finals in this "Crypto Olympics."

MARS, while patented, is available world-wide under a royalty-free license 
from Tivoli Systems, an IBM subsidiary. (See <http://www.tivoli.com>, 
although the Tivoli site doesn't seem to have anything but the press release.)

Serpent is public domain, now under the GNU PUBLIC LICENSE (GPL), although 
Serpent website warns that "some comments in the code still say otherwise." 
<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/serpent.html>

Twofish is "unpatented, and the source code is uncopyrighted and 
license-free; it is free for all uses." 
<http://www.counterpane.com/twofish.html>

  Suerte,
         _Vin