Re: Elliptic Curve Cryptography in SSH

[Douglas Stebila <douglas.stebila%sun.com@localhost>]

On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Nils Larsch wrote:

> > The license that the EC stuff in OpenSSL is released under contains some
> > terms that we won't accept. In particular, the patent license:
>
> Well, the basic GF(p) ec stuff and the ecdsa code were mostly written
> by Bodo Moeller and me and are therefore under the standard OpenSSL
> license. Sun wrote the ECDH code, but put it under the standard OpenSSL
> license.
>
> Greping trough the OpenSSL source code I could only find one file
> with the "covenant" license and that's crypto/bn/bn_gf2m.c =>
> not using GF(2^m) should avoid this license.

The routines in crypto/bn/bn_gf2m.c contain comments indicating where the
algorithm originally came from. (See the file online at
http://cvs.openssl.org/getfile?v=1.10&f=openssl/crypto/bn/bn_gf2m.c) The only
algorithm referenced to Sun Microsystems is the version of BN_GF2m_mod_div from
a paper by Chang-Shantz.  Compilation of this version of BN_GF2m_mod_div is
controlled by the preprocessor flag OPENSSL_SUN_GF2M_DIV and is as far as I
know not compiled in by the default OpenSSL configure script.

Douglas