Subject: Re: Reasons to include ECC to our charter

From: [email-masked] (Peter Gutmann)
Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2001 01:42:40 +1200 (NZST)

Florian Weimer <[email-masked]> writes:

>Ben Laurie <[email-masked]> writes:
>>You can't add it to the _standard_ because of restrictive licensing. I
>>guess Informational RFCs are possible, but they don't make me happy -
>>essentially the WG is doing free work, both technical and marketing, for
>>the owner(s) of the patents.
>
>IIRC, not all ECC stuff is patented, only curves over GF(q), q even, which can
>be implemented efficiently using two-valued logic.

The rule of thumb for ECC is something like "ECC curves are divided into three
groups, weak curves, inefficient curves, and curves patented by Certicom".

Peter.