From: Marc.Ringuette@GS80.SP.CS.CMU.EDU
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 93 00:56:06 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: possible solution to the anonymous harrassment problem
Message-ID: <9301150856.AA27483@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> RSA has a patent on their algorithm.  It's quite likely that I can't
> even create a key pair without their permission, let alone use it.

You're poorly informed.  As a condition of a grant from DARPA to RSADSI,
RSAREF may be used noncommercially, for free, to do any of the following:
     -    RSA encryption and key generation, as defined by RSA Data
            Security's Public-Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS) [4]
     -    MD2 and MD5 message digests [3,5,6]
     -    DES (Data Encryption Standard) in cipher-block chaining mode
            [7,8]
Moreover, I believe you'll find that RSADSI has become much more helpful
recently.  For more information, anonymous ftp to rsa.com and look around.

I've just gone over the RSAREF license agreement again.  It seems to permit
any sort of not-for-profit operation, including a public key service.


-- Marc Ringuette (mnr@cs.cmu.edu)