The new WTO patent rules changed the patent on Diffie-Hellman from
expiring in April 1997 to this September. The RSA algorithms don't
expire until 2000. That's one of the reason's they're changing the
algorithms.
BTW, PGP 5.0 will have cool Web integration: when you generate a key,
it will offer to upload the public key to the MIT key server, and when
you encounter an unknown key, it will offer to search the key server
for you.
Simultaneous release of free version at MIT site and commercial
version (licensed for commercial use) at pgp.com.
- dan
-----Original Message-----
From: adam@cs.caltech.edu [SMTP:adam@cs.caltech.edu]
Sent: Sunday, May 11, 1997 1:16 PM
To: FoRK@pest.w3.org
Subject: Encryption wars, Intel bugs, and Bill Gates, oh my.
fwdd from Educom...
> RSA, PGP IN LEGAL FLAP OVER ENCRYPTION TECHNOLOGY
> RSA Data Security has filed a lawsuit against Pretty Good Privacy
> (PGP), alleging that PGP failed to comply with the terms of a
> licensing agreement that RSA had signed with Lemcom, the company
with
> which PGP merged last year. RSA says Lemcom had "no ability to
> transfer rights to the source code for the Licensed Product to an
OEM
> Customer or anyone else."
Huh? Am I missing something??? Isn't the source code for RSA
trivial???
> When informed that its license agreement to RSA technology was
> canceled, "PGP demanded we sue them in order to exercise audit
rights
> clearly laid out in the agreement," says RSA President Jim Bidzos.
> "Their behavior makes us wonder what they have to hide."
Meanwhile,
> PGP says the products it's developing don't rely on the RSA
encryption
> scheme.
Good for PGP.
> "Those new products will be encryption-algorithm independent," says
> PGP VP Robert Kohn, which will "break RSA monopoly on this
> technology." (InfoWorld Electric 9 May 97)
When does the RSA monopoly expire?