I'm not a lawyer, and neither is Bruce Schneier who is quoted in the article below, but I suspect he's studied the ECC patent situation more than I have (and I looked it quite a bit back when I was chairing ipsec). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_patents If it were up to me, I'm not sure I'd want to bet the DNS infrastructure on whether or not patent lawyers with shark-skin briefcases want to make a mint by instigating a lawsuit. As we've seen with the SCO lawsuit, even completely groundless legal disputes can take years and years, and the only winner is the lawyers. And we've seen how much public key deployment was held back because of the RSA patents; and most people who have lived through those dark times really don't want to revisit them again. As I told the Certicom folks over a decade ago, the best way they could make their (hardware implementation) patents more valuable is by explicitly making a non-assert pledge regarding software implementations of ECC. That would have cleared away a lot of the hesitation around using ECC, since regardless of whether the claims of ECC proponents that "no really, there's no problems here!" are true or not, it would have calmed the fears who've looked at the situation and who have perceived real risks. Of course, the Certicom folks didn't listen to me back then, and I doubt any of them would listen to me now.... - Ted _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf