IEEE P1363: Patent Issues
Under IEEE policy, a working group must identify patent coverage related
to a standard in development. Where coverage may apply, the working group must
obtain a letter from each relevant patent holder assuring that should
the standard be covered by a given patent, the patent will be licensed
in a reasonable and nondiscriminatory manner to users of the standard.
The working group cannot carry out any "significant drafting" of
material covered by a patent until such a letter is obtained. Specifics
of the IEEE policy are given in
IEEE standards documentation.
The working group requested updated information about patents
and trademarks in an open letter.
The P1363 working group has obtained the following letters from several
patent holders providing assurance of patent licensing policy:
-
RSA Data Security and
Security Dynamics (November 9, 1995, August 6, 1998 and April 22, 1999),
regarding U.S. Patent
4,405,829 ("RSA") and EP-Patent 0,384,475, JP-Patent 2,666,191 and U.S. Patent 4,995,082 ("Schnorr")
(click here to see the August 1998 letter)
(click here to see the April 1999 letter)
-
Certicom (March 19, 1997,
June 25, 1998, and November 6, 2002),
regarding
patents and patent applications covering a number of areas of the standard
(click here to see the November 2002
letter [pdf format])
-
IBM (February 2, 1998), regarding a
number of patents related to public-key encryption and key agreement schemes
(click here to see the letter)
-
r3 security engineering
(February
26, 1998), regarding a U.S.
patent and a patent application on the Nyberg-Rueppel digital signature
key agreement method
-
NIST (June 24, 1998), regarding licensing
for U.S. Patent 5,231,668 (DSA) and stating that NIST has no patent on the
SHA algorithm (click here to see the letter)
-
Hitachi (August 3, 1998), regarding patents on RIPEMD and SHA-1 hash functions (click here to see the letter)
-
Hewlett-Packard (September 8, 1998), regarding
a patent application on an elliptic curve point compression technique
(click here to see the letter)
-
Integrity Sciences (May 24, 1999), regarding patent applications related to key agreement schemes (click here to see the letter)
- University of California (June 15, 1999), regarding patent applications related to PSS and PSS-R signature schemes (clicke here to see the letter)
-
Cylink (August 18, 1999), regarding
U.S. Patent 4,587,627
on finite field arithmetic (click here to see the letter)
The working group has also received the following additional
correspondence on intellectual property issues:
-
Mike Matyas, IBM (November 4, 1996 and
December 10, 1996),
identifying one U.S. patent and three patent applications of potential
relevance (superseded by IBM's February 2, 1998 letter)
-
Yuliang Zheng,
Monash University (November 11,
1996 and March 24, 1998), indicating that Jennifer
Seberry and he had not applied for
patents on certain data formats for authenticated public-key encryption
and that he was not aware of any trademark coverage for techniques in P1363
(click here to see both
letters)
-
Hugh
Williams, University
of Manitoba (November 13, 1996 and March 24, 1998),
indicating that he had not applied for patents on the so-called
"Rabin-Williams" digital signature technique
(click here to see both letters)
-
Kazuo Takaragi, Hitachi (November
13, 1996 and January 26, 1997), identifying two
U.S. patents (Nos. 4,982,429 and 5,103,479) and one Japanese patent
application (No. 63-103919) of potential relevance to the
Secure Hash Algorithm and similar hash functions
-
Jennifer Seberry,
University of Wollongong
(November 16,
1996 and June 30, 1998), indicating that Yuliang
Zheng and she had not applied for patents
on certain data formats for authenticated public-key encryption, and
noting a possible copyright issue
(click here to see the June 1998 letter)
-
Mihir Bellare, UC San Diego, and Phil Rogaway, UC Davis
(December 4, 1996 and March 24, 1998) indicating that they had not applied
for patents on
certain data formats and techniques for public-key encryption, and that
the University of California might
apply for a patent on the PSS and PSS-R data formats for signatures
(click here to see the
March 1998 letter)
-
Roger Schlafly (January 26,
1997), regarding patents (U.S.
Patent Nos. 5,274,707; 5,297,208 and 5,373,560) and patents pending, related
to cryptographic implementation techniques (click
here to see the letter)
-
Prof. Dr. Claus P. Schnorr (November 9, 1997 and March 27, 1998),
regarding EP-Patent 0,384,475, U.S. Patent 4,995,082 and JP-Patent 2,666,191 and
their coverage of Nyberg-Rueppel and DSA signatures
(click here to see the
March 1998 letter)
-
Security Dynamics
(March 1 and April 5, 1999), regarding trademark protection of the name "RSA"
(click here to see the March 1999 letter)
(click here to see the April 1999 letter)
-
Antoon Bosselaers (April 21, 1999), stating that the
authors have no patent claims for
the RIPEMD-160 hash function (click here to see the letter)
The IEEE Standards
Department
will maintain copies of these letters
as part of its permanent file for the IEEE P1363 project.
The working group has
requested permission from the authors of the letters to post the letters
on this Web page; the letters will be added as permission is received.
Some of the material in the various responses is relevant to techniques
that had at one time been considered for the P1363 standard, but which
have been deferred to the P1363a project.
The working group has sent two open letters requesting information about
patents, one in October 1996
and the other in
February 1998.
The first was sent initially to the P1363 mailing list, the
sci.crypt news group,
Prof. Mihir Bellare (UC San Diego), Dr. Stephen M.
Matyas (IBM), Dr. Kaisa Nyberg
(Finnish
Defence Forces), Prof.
Michael
O. Rabin (Harvard University),
Prof. Phil Rogaway (UC Davis),
Dr. Rainer Rueppel (r3 security
engineering),
Prof. Jennifer Seberry
(University of Wollongong), Prof.
H.C. Williams (University of
Manitoba),
Dr. Yuliang
Zheng (Monash University),
and representatives of
Certicom, Cylink, Matsushita Corporation,
National Institute
of Standards and Technology (NIST), NTT, NeXT
Computer, RSA Data Security,
Siemens, and
Thomson. It was later
also sent to Prof. Silvio Micali
(MIT). The second was sent to the
P1363 mailing list, to those who
responded to the first letter (generally with further requests for
clarification requested by the working group), and to some who had not
responded to the first letter. It was also sent to NIST with a request
for clarification on issues related to the Digital Signature Algorithm
and the Secure Hash Algorithm, and to representatives of HP, Sun and
TRW.
This site was last modified on March 17, 2000.
