Re: [Cfrg] 40 bit loop and DragonFly

[Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>]

Kevin,

On 01/05/2014 01:41 AM, Igoe, Kevin M. wrote:
> Potential IPR issues:
> Certicom has granted permission to the IETF to use the NIST curves, 
> and at least two of these, P256 and P384, have p = 3 mod 4.  

I'm not sure what exactly you mean there. From my POV, Certicom
have declared [1] that they consider that some of their IPR is somehow
required in order to implement the most excellent RFC 6090 [2] which
only references things published at least a year before Certicom's
first filing. I also seem to recall that some of their IPR
declarations do include restrictions on things like CAs issuing
certs.

So "granted permission" is not quite so clear. At least not
without either being a lawyer, or having whatever time machine
Certicom's lawyers seem to possess. I doubt we'll clarify the
IPR situation around ECC here, nor around PAKEs unfortunately.

But I think we can conclude that the Dragonfly goal of designing
around existing IPR remains a valid design goal. Whether or not
Dan has succeeded in that is another matter, participants who
care about IPR need to evaluate that for themselves.

S.

[1]
https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/search/?option=rfc_search&rfc_search=6090
[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6090

> Not 
> being a patent lawyer, I have no idea what impact the Certicom patents 
> have on the use of newer families of curves, such as Edwards curves.  
> RFC 6090 outlines elliptic curve technology which predates the Certicom
> patents.