IETF Logo Mail Archive

Re: Reasons to include ECC to our charter

pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann) Fri, 10 August 2001 13:59 UTC

Received: from above.proper.com (above.proper.com [208.184.76.39]) by ietf.org (8.9.1a/8.9.1a) with ESMTP id JAA05023 for <openpgp-archive@odin.ietf.org>; Fri, 10 Aug 2001 09:59:31 -0400 (EDT)
Received: by above.proper.com (8.11.3/8.11.3) id f7ADglG20399 for ietf-openpgp-bks; Fri, 10 Aug 2001 06:42:47 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from kakapo.cs.auckland.ac.nz (kakapo.cs.auckland.ac.nz [130.216.34.10]) by above.proper.com (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id f7ADgjN20391 for <ietf-openpgp@imc.org>; Fri, 10 Aug 2001 06:42:45 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from ruru.cs.auckland.ac.nz (firebird.cs.auckland.ac.nz [130.216.34.12]) by kakapo.cs.auckland.ac.nz (8.8.6/8.8.6/cs-master) with ESMTP id BAA24755; Sat, 11 Aug 2001 01:42:40 +1200 (NZST) (sender pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz)
Received: (from pgut001@localhost) by ruru.cs.auckland.ac.nz (8.9.3/8.8.6/cs-slave) id BAA232398; Sat, 11 Aug 2001 01:42:40 +1200 (NZST) (sender pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz)
Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2001 01:42:40 +1200
Message-ID: <200108101342.BAA232398@ruru.cs.auckland.ac.nz>
From: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz
To: Florian.Weimer@RUS.Uni-Stuttgart.DE, ietf-openpgp@imc.org
Subject: Re: Reasons to include ECC to our charter
Sender: owner-ietf-openpgp@mail.imc.org
Precedence: bulk
List-Archive: <http://www.imc.org/ietf-openpgp/mail-archive/>
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:ietf-openpgp-request@imc.org?body=unsubscribe>
List-ID: <ietf-openpgp.imc.org>

Florian Weimer <Florian.Weimer@RUS.Uni-Stuttgart.DE> writes:

>Ben Laurie <ben@algroup.co.uk> writes:
>>You can't add it to the _standard_ because of restrictive licensing. I
>>guess Informational RFCs are possible, but they don't make me happy -
>>essentially the WG is doing free work, both technical and marketing, for
>>the owner(s) of the patents.
>
>IIRC, not all ECC stuff is patented, only curves over GF(q), q even, which can
>be implemented efficiently using two-valued logic.

The rule of thumb for ECC is something like "ECC curves are divided into three
groups, weak curves, inefficient curves, and curves patented by Certicom".

Peter.

v2.23.0 | Report a Bug | By Email