On 9/1/15, 13:54 , "TLS on behalf of Dave Garrett" <tls-boun...@ietf.org on behalf of davemgarr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Tuesday, September 01, 2015 01:24:05 pm Jeffrey Walton wrote: >>> They, however, obviously do have the choice of switching from DSA to >>>ECDSA, so that argument doesn't make much sense here. >> >> I suppose that depends on how threatened you feel by Certicom’s claimed >>patents on EC. > >If the US Federal government actually got sued over ECC patents, I would >hope they'd just abolish them and move on. I don’t think it’s as simple as that. US government licensed some of the ECC technology from Certicom. But I’ve heard Certicom claim that the licensing terms are so narrow that only direct national security applications qualify for that license. This isn’t something where vendors (and their lawyers) can rely on “would hope”. >This is all a side-discussion, here, though. The US government's >requirements are not our concern here. Dropping DSA in TLS leaves two >perfectly fine options available to them, RSA & ECDSA, plus a new one yet >to be added by the CFRG. They have to eventually keep up with things just >like everyone else. If they want to be sloppy and keep DSA around, it's >not like they couldn't just ignore that part of the eventual TLS 1.3 RFC >within their own ecosystem. Everyone else, however, will be fine with the >rest. The problem is that standardization of an algorithm or a technology by IETF or IRTF is completely unrelated to the patent/licensing status of that algorithm or technology. So unless Certicom comes forward and explicitly releases its IPR, most of the vendors would consider the patended and therefore toxic. I know I would. And forcing those vendors to spend money on licensing isn’t going to work (recall RSA). This would be a strong reason to hold on to DSA until the ECC patents expire. (Like it happened with RSA.)
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
_______________________________________________ TLS mailing list TLS@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tls
