Talk:ECC patents

6,141,420 is invalidated by prior art?

Would Certicom agree that their patent claim 6,141,420 is invalidated by prior art? If not, we cannot assert it (according to Wikipedia's neutrality policy, NPOV). We can still describe the argument that it is invalidated, of course, as long as we don't take sides. — Matt Crypto 17:39, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

• The Case for Elliptic Curve Cryptography, National Security Agency discusses the patent situation and says Certicom holds over 130 patents in ECC and PKC and NSA's license covers 29 of them. --agr 12:31, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

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I removed the following material as OR, POV and legal advice, all inappropriate for Wikipedia. --agr 16:25, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Certicom holds US patent 6,141,420: Elliptic Curve Encryption Systems which describes point compression starting from Claim 29: instead of sending a pair $(x,y)$ that satisfies $F(x,y)=0$ one sends x and the recipient recovers y using the equation alone (Claim 29) or using an additional hint about which of several y was used (Claim 30). Here the art is (lossless) data compression and every person having ordinary skill in the art is aware of predictor-corrector method used here: using partial data (x and, possibly, a hint) and the knowledge of data distribution ($F(x,y)=0$) the recipient recovers the whole information. This means that such broad claims are clearly invalid. The more specific claims about particular methods also have prior art. For example, the idea that you can do ECDH with x-coordinates only already appears in one of the two original papers first suggesting elliptic curve cryptosystems (Victor Miller, CRYPTO '85). The idea to use one bit to compress a specific y-coordinate is newer — it appears in (Harper et al, 1992). The technique for the GF(p) case is described here. The printed proceedings for this conference (held in May 1992) were published by Springer-Verlag in February 1993, so this case is quite clear.

The statement above is one person’s opinion as to the validity of claims in Certicom’s patent related to point compression. The facts, however suggest strong support for this patent.

The inventor of this patent, Dr. Scott A. Vanstone, is a world renowned cryptographer and is cited in the literature extensively. Secondly, if you read the NSA FAQ posted at Certicom you will see that the point compression patent was one of the 26 patents licensed by the NSA. The NSA is the world’s largest single employer of mathematicians. The USPTO would have reviewed all the obvious prior art (stated above) before issuing this patent and the NSA would not have licensed this patent if it believed it was invalid.

There are at least two plausible reasons for the NSA to license the patents even if they felt they were worthless:

• First, simply to avoid legal hassles. Is it better to pay the danegeld or fight the dane? If they can negotiate a good enough deal (Certicom has certainly benefited by trumpeting it, so it might have been for very little money), maybe it's less hassle than proving them useless.
• Second, to discourage use of ECC. Say the NSA thinks that ECC is good, and it makes their job (signals intelligence) harder. One way to slow down its widespread use would be to tie it up in patent knots. It worked with RSA for a couple of decades, after all.

I don't know, but I wonder. 71.41.210.146 (talk) 16:23, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

"The USPTO would have reviewed all the obvious prior art (stated above) before issuing this patent..."

Proof by Appeal to Authority?. The USPTO has been known to make bad decisions in the past during their evaluations.

Jeffrey Walton 00:24, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Let's keep useful information

The emails by Alexander Klimov and Bodo Moeller in the list of sources contain valuable analysis of the patent situation. Unless someone is willing to replace them with an equally useful source, it makes sense to keep these links in the article. Dimawik (talk) 04:12, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree. The links are clearly not spam. WP:EL says "Wikipedia articles may include links to web pages outside Wikipedia. Such pages could contain further research that is accurate and on-topic; information that could not be added to the article for reasons such as copyright or amount of detail; or other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article for reasons unrelated to its accuracy." The list in question is well respected and moderated. The linked messages contain substantial amounts of accurate material, and while they also contain opinion, that is clearly marked as such. We are not endorsing the opinion by including the link. I think the links provide a service to our readers, absent a better-published review.--agr (talk) 13:01, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

I also agree. It looks like the editor, who removed the content, did so based on the adress of the link without considering the content of the mail. 81.62.44.149 (talk) 11:28, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

"... ECMQV is no longer part of Suite B"

If I recall correctly, ECMQV is no longer part of Suite B due to security defects (which Menezes has since remediated), not patent status. I recall reading the papers, but don't have a link handy.

Jeffrey Walton 00:18, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

External links modified

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More references please

Can somebody find and add patent number references to entries without them, esp those of Certicom? This allows easier searching for patent end dates. Robbat2 (talk) 02:29, 23 October 2017 (UTC)