As far as I'm concerned, ECC isn't a legitimate public key
algorithm for enterprise use at this time because you can't
buy a cert from a CA listed in a major browser where the
cert uses ECC.
Also, those of use who went through the onerous and in the end
counterproductive experience of licensing RSA can tell you that
the "give me money or I'll sue you" business model got old after a
while. I'm not a lawyer but I do have to give CTO-class advice
and, assuming you've found a business case for ECC, I always recommend
people do a build/buy/license/"let them threaten litigation we don't
care" comparison before entering into not-obviously-useful patent
licensing deals. So I recommending paying a lawyer to determine if you
even care about some vendor's alleged patent portfolio.
The fact ECC is in OpenSSL is cute. In the "oh, isn't that cool,
they implement IDEA, RC-6, and ECC" kind of exotic crypto side-show
kind of way. It's not part of "openssl, the open source TLS/SSL
implementation you can use in the real world" any more than any other
non-IE/Firefox-supported TLS ciphersuite combination would be.
I'd be more impressed with the NSA/Certicom deal if I could find any
public evidence there's any PKI anywhere using ECC for a US .gov. As it
is this just ends up looking like another exotic military purchase not
related to the enterprise world. Show me an HSPD-12 spec that tells me
I have to use ECC ;-)
Larry Bugbee wrote:
There is no substitute for legal counsel, but Tom had a summary that you
might be interested in...
http://libtom.org/pages/toorcon8_ecc_tstdenis.pdf
See slides 24-27.
Larry
On Jan 10, 2008, at 2:25 PM, Anilkumar Bollineni wrote:
Thanks a lot for the responses.
Bill, I agree with you that the use of ECC is really matters here, the
area where Certicom holds ECC patents. One of our application with
respect to ECC that are planning to use ECDSA (Elliptic Curve DSA)
signature based certificate generation/verification, signature
generation/verification. Meanwhile I talked to one of the sales guy
from Certicom, and he is saying that one of certicom patents is
related to ECDSA and he said if I want to do ECDSA from OpenSSL, then
I need to get license.I am not sure whether that information is
correct or not.
The OpenSSL does not say anyword about the EC/ECDSA usage and its
patents information in Certicom. The only thing I got about that is
that Sun has donated the EC code to OpenSSL.
If OpenSSL users are really violating the Certicom patents then if
users need to be aware of that, then it is better that OpenSSL tell
some information about it in the release notes. Or May be that OpenSSL
EC implementation does not violate any certicom patents and that's why
OpenSSL is not mentioning? Could somebody has any insight in it?
Thanks again.
Best Regards,
Anil
Bill Colvin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I would characterize the Certicom patents as falling into 3 main
categories:
1) patents relating to the use of ECC in very specific
application circumstances
This represents the bulk of Certicom patents. For these patents you
will have to do your own research as they are dependent on you
application and have nothing to do with OpenSSL.
2) patents that improve the performance of the underlying
mathematics
For these patents, it would be difficult to say if the developers who
implemented the underlying math algorithms happened to implement a
patented Certicom technique. However, unless they were actually using
the patent docs during implementation, I doubt that this would be the
case.
3) patents on ECC techniques
Now these are the ones you can find in the implementation of OpenSSL.
There are two main ones here – point compression and MQV. Point
compression reduces the size of an ECC public key, but ECC keys are
much smaller than RSA keys even without it, so this one can be
avoided. MQV is a key exchange technique. It also can be avoided by
using ECDH.
NSA licensed 26 Certicom patents (which includes MQV and point
compression) for use in government applications with prime modulus
curves greater than 255. This is a good Q&A on the details of this
license
http://www.certicom.ca/download/aid-501/FAQ-The%20NSA%20ECC%20License%20Agreement.pdf
NSA did not license all of Certicom’s patents, only a subset for use
in a limited “field of use”.
Bill
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Anilkumar Bollineni
Sent: January 10, 2008 2:12 PM
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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