From: Richard.Johnson@Colorado.EDU (Richard Johnson)
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 95 16:37:03 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: RC4
Message-ID: <v02130501ac3ee1843139@[199.117.100.37]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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>So, does anyone know for certain if this is the true letter of the law?
>Since RC4 has been reverse engineered (or leaked) to the public, do they
>have any claim on it if there is no patent?  Seeing the legal web that
>surrounds a lot of the current crypto situation in the US, it's not
>surprising that RSA would try to smoke screen everyone into thinking that
>there would be a clear violation (prosecutable by law) if anyone used RC4
>without getting a license.  (It's also not surprising that no one's tried
>as well...)

A acquaintance of mine at a now-defunct company compared the reverse
engineered RC4 work-alike that was released on the net with the source they
had licensed from RSADSI.  She noted that the implementations were quite
different (structure and variable names were both very different), so the
work-alike released on the net was indeed most likely reverse engineered.
Someone else queried two or three other BSAFE source licensees, and found
all agreed that the code was not cribbed from BSAFE sources.  Sadly, I no
longer have copies of the (anonymous) post.

Still, I'm not rich enough to punch through RSADSI's smoke screen...


Richard

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