On Tue, 4 Jul 2000, P.J. Ponder wrote:
> >From the Edupage newsletter:
>
> PATENTS GRANTED FOR ENCRYPTION OF WEB MUSIC
> Three mathematicians at Brown University recently were awarded a
> patent for a system that encodes every second of music downloaded
> from a Web site with a different encryption key, breaking a
> typical song up into more than 200 different codes. NTRU
> Cryptosystems, a Rhode Island firm, now owns the patent to the
> device. The system, which utilizes "public key" encryption,
> makes it impossible to play a song on any other device except for
> the one owned by the authorized user. The system works for
> virtually all data transmissions between computers, cell phones,
> digital music players, or any consumer electronic device that has
> Web access. Once a consumer orders music online, the user's
> computer or music player gives the Web site's server the encoding
> key, which is used to encode the data and then thrown away, and
> the music is sent back to the user's computer, which already
> knows the key. (New York Times, July 3 2000)
See also
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/biztech/articles/03pate.html
The patent itself
http://164.195.100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='6,081,597'.WKU.&OS=PN/6,081,597&RS=PN/6,081,597
is for NTRU cryptosystem, invented by Silverman and Co. NTRU, IMHO,
deserves some publicity, since it promises quite high speed public
encryption. But being a quite new cryptosystem, it does not have a 'proven
by practice' security behind it, and many cryptographers tend to be
suspicious of its security. Not that many have succeeded in breaking it,
either. The only published cryptanalytic papers are by Coppersmith and
Shamir, and by Jaulmes and Joux (the later is going to be published in
Crypto 2000).
We definitely need a cryptosystem of that speed.
Helger
