Please read the Wikipedia page on it? Due to some of the circumstances surrounding the RSA algorithm's patenting, it became impossible for patents to be issued on the algorithm outside the US. This, along with the US government's encryption export policies, is why the PGPi (international PGP) project came about, and why nobody was ever sued for making use of it on patent grounds -- the patent simply didn't apply outside the US.
And, now that the patent has expired in the US, nobody can be sued for it on patent grounds here either. Please note that there are other legal requirements related to cryptography to be exported from the US. You will need to look at the Bureau of Export Administration website (it's part of the Department of Commerce), and most likely query a lawyer who is familiar with the topic since they are complex and arcane. (Open-source projects can generally be made available upon notification to the government of the URL that they are at, and applications which use open-source cryptographic components can mostly be made available, but there are some important limitations and caveats that are beyond my understanding.) -Kyle H On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 12:26 PM, Salman Ahmed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If I use the following functions from OpenSSL to sign data and later verify > the data/signature using an RSA keypair: > > EVP_SignInit(); > EVP_SignUpdate(); > EVP_SignFinal(); > > EVP_VerifyInit(); > EVP_VerifyUpdate(); > EVP_VerifyFinal(); > > in an application that is distributed globally around the world, does the RSA > patent become an encumberance given that this application's use and > distribution is not limited to North America even though the RSA patent > expired in 2000? > > IANAL, and I am getting conflicting information about the use of the above > signing & verification functions in OpenSSL together with an RSA keypair in > an application that is to be used and distributed around the world. > > Thanks! > > > > > ______________________________________________________________________ > OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org > User Support Mailing List openssl-users@openssl.org > Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org User Support Mailing List openssl-users@openssl.org Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED]
