From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 94 11:08:10 PST
To: "L. Todd Masco" <cactus@hks.net>
Subject: Re: Patents to be placed in PD
In-Reply-To: <199412061858.NAA13101@bb.hks.net>
Message-ID: <9412061906.AA07443@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



"L. Todd Masco" says:
> IBM's patent covered modular key management in a manner that isn't
> clear to me.

Not just you; the opinion of some of the IBMers there was that they
didn't think it covered their proposal, either.

> SKIP is Simple Key management for Internet Protocols: it's an elegant
> key management system that uses Diffie-Hellman public keys (Aziz notes
> that any DH-like scheme will work).  The IPsec folks wanted (or just
> were considering it?) to use it in their secure IP work, but were balking
> at the patent status.

Just considering it. In my opinion, none of the existing key
management proposals is sufficient. They all have the feature that
very good cryptographers have sweated over the cryptography in them
but that the systems don't attach enough information to the resultant
security associations to permit you to actually write secure
applications, which in the end makes the excercise less than
completely successfull.

.pm