Subject: Re: Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange draft

From: Theo de Raadt <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 May 2004 10:41:17 -0600 (MDT)

In other words, the primary SSH development team is telling you

Go ahead! Standardize anything that is patented that you
feel you need to -- seeing as IETF is just a corporate
slave nowadays -- and we will entirely ignore it.

If it is not free, we will actively work against it.

If some vendor decides to ship with a patented version,
we might even find some way to punish them.

So go ahead -- knock yourself out...

>Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
>> [wearing my WG chair hat.]
>> Doug:
>> 
>> There is an old story about how penguins decide it's safe to go
>> swimming.  A large crowd of them mill about near the edge of the ice,
>> jostling each other until finally one of them falls in.  The remaining
>> ones then see if the first bird gets eaten by a shark -- if not, the
>> rest jump in..
>> 
>> With ECC, we're in the milling-about stage.  Sharks have been sighted,
>> though not very recently.  But the penguins are still nervous and
>> really would prefer that someone else go first....
>> 
>> This WG has limited time and energy.  For this to be adopted as a WG
>> item I'll need to hear from a community of implementors interested in
>> adopting it.
>> 
>> When possible, this WG (like much of the IETF as a whole) has
>> traditionally preferred functionaly equivalent unencumbered technology
>> even when it has lower performance (see DSS vs RSA).
>> 
>> The message I'm getting from WG members who have spoken up thus far is
>> that the uncertainties regarding the ECC IPR situation make it
>> uninteresting to them.
>
>OpenSSH has no desire to implement anything tainted by patents and we
>strongly oppose any efforts to standardise encumbered methods in
>IETF-published standards.
>
>That goes for "free to use with strings attached" patent licenses too,
>such as the code that Sun contributed to OpenSSL.
>
>-d
>