[tor-dev] is ECC patented? (was: Draft sketch document with ideas for future crypto ops)

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

A few pointers. On the happy "yay we can use it freely" side, we have:

* RFC 6090

Pure gold! A catalog of ECC techniques which were published so long
ago that they cannot still be under patent. It includes digital
signatures and Diffie-Hellman.

* DJB's page stating that certain patents don't apply to Curve25519
(which you mentioned): http://cr.yp.to/ecdh/patents.html

* Jack Lloyd's statement that he avoided techniques newer than about
1990 in Botan: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=615372#c19

On the sad "no we can't use it" side, we have:

* Fedora's insistence on removing all elliptic curve cryptography from
their Linux distribution and refusing to answer questions about why:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=615372

Regards,

Zooko