Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) Newsgroups: sci.crypt Subject: Re: encryption with public keys Message-ID: <7450@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Mon, 29-Dec-86 21:28:28 EST Article-I.D.: utzoo.7450 Posted: Mon Dec 29 21:28:28 1986 Date-Received: Mon, 29-Dec-86 21:28:28 EST References: <3072@ihuxf.UUCP> <9001@duke.duke.UUCP> <7447@utzoo.UUCP>, <230@gaia.UUCP> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 30 > Henry, do you have any idea just what is patented? ... Not in detail. I believe they actually succeeded in getting a patent on the basic idea of RSA encryption, not just on a specific implementation. > ... I wonder if a system to do fast modulo exponentiation > would be verboten? Not unless you use it to do encryption! :-) More seriously, I doubt that the RSA patent covers encryption using large-number arithmetic in general; it's just the specific scheme using two big prime factors and their product for encryption that's patented, I would guess. > Sadly, patents are getting pretty ridiculous these days; > algorithms are not supposed to be patentable, so what is RSA encryption but > an algorithm? ... One can argue that it's not exactly an algorithm, but that's pretty thin ice. More to the point, the idea of being unable to patent an algorithm was always pretty silly: the whole idea of patents is to protect useful inventions, and a useful new algorithm, solving a significant problem in a novel way, would certainly seem to fit an intuitive definition of "invention". The fuss about algorithms resulted, as I understand it, from confusion with the natural-law exclusion (patenting something "invented" by nature is obviously silly, but there is no occurrence of RSA encryption in nature!) and the fuzzy boundaries between science, mathematics, and computer "science" (which is primarily an engineering discipline, whose inventions should obviously be patentable). -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry