As a followup you might ask your lawyers to verify if the NSA license
is applicable to you. It is my understanding that they may only be
applicable when your product is running in a FIPS-140-2 verified
mode. Meaning that you have to go through the FIPS-140-2 verification
etc before it would be covered by that license.
As Bob points out you are safest if you pay your own lawyers to map
the minefield as it applies to your product.
- max
On Jan 10, 2008, at 1:25 PM, Bob Bell (rtbell) wrote:
Anil -
There are a lot of legal issues surrounding the use of Certicom
patented ECC code. One of the things that happened a couple of IETF
meetings ago was that Certicom signed a letter allowing the use of
some of their patents for things like TLS. However, there are a
number of legal requirements attached, including the listing/
displaying of the Certicom patents on splash screens or on the
hardware device depending on the type of implementation. I would
strongly urge you to have a lawyer research these licensing
agreements and then research (with you) what additional patents
might be involved (for instance Certicom has a patent on having an
ECC public key in an X.509 cert signed using RSA) in your product.
While ECC is a marvelous technology, there is a large minefield
that still needs to be mapped.
Bob Bell
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-openssl-
[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Anilkumar Bollineni
Sent: Thursday, 10 January, 2008 12:12
To: openssl-users@openssl.org
Subject: About ECC patent and OpenSSL ECC code
Hi there,
I have a question on OpenSSL ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography)
code. I saw that Sun systems has donated the the ECCcode to
OpenSSL. Also I saw that Certicom has held 130 patents in ECC
area and finally NSA has licensed that code.
Suppose if I download the code from the OpenSSL and try to develop
a product using the OpenSSL ECC code, does it violate any patent
issue with certicom?
Can anybody share any experience or information about this?
Thanks for support.
-Anil
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