[18475] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: ECC patents?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven M. Bellovin)
Thu Sep 15 14:03:56 2005
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From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
To: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>
Cc: cryptography@metzdowd.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 15 Sep 2005 09:54:29 PDT."
<432944D5.19658.544675B@localhost>
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 13:17:42 -0400
In message <432944D5.19658.544675B@localhost>, "James A. Donald" writes:
> --
>Whyte, William:
>> It hints that only some particular curves have been
>> licensed. It could be that NSA has decided not to buy
>> a license for the other curves, or it could be that
>> operations on those curves aren't patented. The
>> presentation doesn't give enough information to
>> establish which.
>
>If the NSA paid anything significant for any of the
>curves, we would be told. Therefore the NSA paid
>nothing or almost nothing, and therefore if the NSA
>licensed anything, it would have licensed everything.
>
>I doubt that the NSA paid any money whatsoever for this
>license, making it profoundly unimpressive as evidence
>that *any* curves have a plausible valid patent. If the
>NSA paid real money, the patent holders would be
>sticking it in our face as a price setting precedent.
>
We have been told. I downloaded Certicom's 2005 annual report
(http://www.certicom.com/download/aid-503/Certicom2005AR.pdf).
On p. 11, it says
For the year ended April 30, 2004, revenue from IP totalled
$25-million represented by a licensing contract for our
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) technology by the NSA,
--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
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