[109683] in Cypherpunks
Re: RSA claiming trademark on all uses of "RSA"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ulf =?iso-8859-1?Q?M=F6ller?=)
Thu Apr 1 12:46:03 1999
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 18:22:46 +0100
From: Ulf =?iso-8859-1?Q?M=F6ller?= <ulf@fitug.de>
To: cypherpunks@infonex.com
In-Reply-To: <v04020a36b32907552e73@[139.167.130.249]>; from Robert Hettinga on Thu, Apr 01, 1999 at 06:22:07AM -0500
Reply-To: Ulf =?iso-8859-1?Q?M=F6ller?= <ulf@fitug.de>
> If S-D were to allow "RSA" to be used in the IEEE standard, they might
> lose their rights, since the term RSA would then mean the algo covered by
> the standard, not the product shipped by them. It would cease to identify
> them as the originator of the goods.
That is silly. The term RSA has always referred to the algorithm.
RSADSI itself defines "RSA" as follows:
"RSA is a public-key algorithm invented by Rivest, Shamir,
and Adleman [RSA78] involving exponentiation modulo the
product of two large prime numbers. The difficulty of
breaking RSA is generally considered to be equal to the
difficulty of factoring integers that are the product of two
large prime numbers of approximately equal size."
(Burt Kaliski, An Overview of the PKCS Standards, RSA Laboratories
Technical Note, 1993.)
"RSA: The RSA public-key cryptosystem, as defined in [RSA78]."
(PKCS #1: RSA Encryption Standard, RSA Laboratories Technical Note, 1993.)
