Re: Fighting Clipper III

["Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

On Thu, 3 Oct 1996, Jim McCoy wrote:

> Declan McCullagh <declan@eff.org> writes:
> >You'll have trouble doing a successful boycott of RSA. What, you won't
> >use Netscape Navigator or PGP?
> 
> Actually RSA is not a hard target for people like us to threaten.  The
> Diffie-Hellman patent expires in 210 days.  Cylink is prevented from taking
> legal action against anyone for violating this patent while the current
> lawsuit is being decided.  When Diffie-Hellman expires ElGamal is available
> for use for free.  So the best threat one can make against RSA is to directly
> challenge their revenue stream: start working on making ElGamal an available
> option in all systems which use RSA.

Rabin public-key encryption will also be free when the D-H patent expires.
This has the big advantage that it can use current RSA keys as long as the
keys use blum integers (PGP does, I think).  Breaking Rabin is provably as
difficult as factoring.

Mark
- -- 
PGP encrypted mail prefered.
Key fingerprint = d61734f2800486ae6f79bfeb70f95348
http://www.voicenet.com/~markm/

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.3
Charset: noconv

iQEVAwUBMlQ+NSzIPc7jvyFpAQFnOQf/TasoroPI6ZUfRuH/13jQedY+R49KYjoc
pdOnEmRfzuF3CFt5ZJatB97B+kz50VZMcT4nMGhK24q5fZcvJqTcVDbGMEPJgmeZ
1TZAFiGAXcKjnuB+i1PuGpPkM6SjLkXiuxW4ZASiWtmQ2hCnlCKm/EN+lvW5avjT
HjK3W6GiU4HvSmsL292S1jgMrPw/0vbEtQ9J65edamtDboDLfrbYd26OAh0QjUxe
vlTHrVcU5v5n4kVxjfvhdVabJOGmFAQ+cIKCVSTmhELPmbYkRp+TIgsRTse15NpK
ocEKfpsHZu093AMnealZ6+/neCBWtqKSL2Jz7yHTCDbXkMw0Ab/nLQ==
=SJUX
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----