NIST - PKP settlements not over yet

[Stanton McCandlish <mech@eff.org>]

[from Gregory Aharonian's Internet Patent News Service]

A hostile response to a tentative agreement to settle a patent dispute
over the proposed Digital Signature Standard has forced the National Institute
of Standards and Technology to return to negotiations.  Last summer, NIST
officials thought they finally settled the DSS public key patent dispute by
granting Public Key Partners (PKP) of Sunnyvale, California, an exclusive
worldwide license for the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) on which the DSS
is built.

In exchange for sublicensing rights, the PKP group agreed to endorse
NIST's DSS proposal.  But F. Lynn McNulty, associate director for computer
security with NIST's Computer System Laboratory, said a majority of potential
DSS users balked at the deal.  NIST published the settlement terms for
comment, and McNulty said all but 10 of the 270 comments were critical.
[as many of you may remember, EFF coordinated the transmission of these
comments to NIST, who did not widely announce the request for comment at all.
The uncharitable might call that an attempt to sweep the matter under the rug.
The naive might call it an oversight.  At any rate almost all of the comments
NIST received were routed via EFF, who were happy to publicize it "for" NIST.]
Many DSS critics have argued that another algorithm promulgated by RSA
Data Security (Redwood City, CA), is a de facto industry digital signature
standard and that it would cost too much to comply with a separate government
standard.

Now NIST is attempting to hammer out a new settlement based on the
comments, McNulty said.  "The real hang-up continues to be the patent issue",
McNulty said.  "We're still trying to resolve it".

Scientists at CSL designed the CSS to serve as a standard agency tool for
verifying the senders and contents of messages transmitted electronically.
CSL also prescribed the public key Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA).

But PKP, which holds the rights to public key patents on behalf of
Stanford University, MIT, and most recently, German professor Claus Schnorr,
charged that CSL's proposed algorithm infringed upon these patents.  NIST
originally sponsored DSA research, and agencies are exempt from any licensing
fees.  PKP, however, has maintained that vendors that incorporate the
standard into their products should pay royalties.
[Government Computer News 1/24/94, 58]

-- 
Stanton McCandlish * mech@eff.org * Electronic Frontier Found. OnlineActivist
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