ECC Patents

Just trying to brew up discussion here,

With the noise about Suite B [NSA licensed ECC crypto] and Certicom
putting on a show two weeks ago ... I have to ask myself: What patents
does certicom have that actually stop someone from freely implementing
ECC.

>>From what I know they have patents on

1. point compression [joke, hard to hold up in court]
2. MQV
3. Some forms of ONB representation
4. Some things about sparse keys and duplicate key prevention [???]

But things they don't have patents on are

1. ECC as a one-way trapdoor
2. ECDSA and ECDH
3. Polynomial basis representations
4. Affine, Projective and Jacobian representations of points
5. NAF, comb and fixed-point multipliers

So really how is someone stopped from using Suite B curves [which are a
subset of the NIST P curves] and doing things like ECDSA or ECDH?

Is it all just corporate posturing B.S. like I think it is?

I think the worst thing they can do if they want to have the acceptance
of ECC is stiffle innovation and sit on top of a few patents.
Specially since quite a bit of the work out there isn't owned by
Certicom.

Ironically the crew that wrote HAC also wrote a book on ECC [which is a
great read BTW] and the book is basically full of public domain
algorithms and techniques that aren't covered by Certicom. They don't
cover ONB representations. And these are Certicom folk! I don't know
what is going on there but I'd say that subverts there whole "you must
fall into our patent portfolio" line of thinking.

Tom

[Cheap plug: I'm re-writing the ECC in my LTC to be among other things
cleaner and faster. It'll support both w-NAF and Fixed point
precomputation]
Received on Mon Oct 17 20:48:36 2005