Subject: AW: Reasons to include ECC to our charter

From: "Dominikus Scherkl" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Sep 2001 11:15:48 +0200

Hi.

> > Certicom may have.  Specifically, Certicom claims to have a patent
> > application covering point compression, and noone else really knows
> > what is in it.  So it may be prudent to avoid compressed point
> > representations.

I agree to this. Also from a mathematical point of view compression is
somewhat unfortunate, because no proper algorithm for curves over odd
extension fields has been developed. So we better say implementations
MAY use it for prime and char-2 based curves instead of SHOULD.

> 
> It seems to me entirely unacceptable that we should even be discussing
> I-Ds which relate to patents of unknown content. Certicom 
> should either reveal what they do or do not have pending, or go away.

I'm also somewhat concerned that noone of certicom said any word about
the whole discussion over ecc-patents on this list.

Even if it's not our job to care which parts of a standard require
licences
from any corporation to be sold in an implementation, I would be proud
to hear for which parts patents are claimed - or else we couldn't
insert any hints to these patents in the draft (which would be nice).

-- 
Dominikus Scherkl
Biodata Application Security AG
mail: [email-masked]

---

From: Bodo Moeller <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Sep 2001 20:41:18 +0200 (CEST)

> extension fields has been developed.

Algorithms for computing square roots in odd-characteristic extension
fields do exist (see chapter 7 in Sachar Paulus, "Algorithmen für
endliche abelsche Gruppen", Diplomarbeit, Unversität des Saarlandes,
1993), but none of the current specifications (such as the IEEE P1363a
drafts) defines what the compression bit should look like.  I think
the most obvious choice would be, given a polynomial representation of
a non-zero field element with coefficients in the underlying prime
field, to find the lowest-indexed non-zero coefficient and use its
LSB.