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US Patent 5,511,122
To: Jeff Schiller, Security Area Director, IETF, <jis@mit.edu>
From: Randall Atkinson, <rja@inet.org>
Subject: Notification of patent
I have just been officially notified that US Patent 5, 511, 122 on
"Intermediate Network Authentication" was issued to me on 23 April 1996 with
all rights assigned to The United States of America as represented by the
Secretary of the Navy. The filing date on this patent is 3 June 1994 and
the work was begun in 1991.
The funded project work behind this patent was unrelated to IPsec and
primarily related to a need for intermediate network authentication of
datagrams in a network that performed intermediate fragmentation of datagrams.
I am not a lawyer and I am not making any kind of legal representation, but
I believe that this patent DOES NOT create any issues with respect to current
IPsec RFCs or any current IPsec draft that I am aware of or any other IETF
standard that I'm aware of. The patent might affect a (hypothetical) AH
transform proposal that used cryptographic digital signatures based on
asymmetric cryptography (e.g. an RSA digital signature), as distinguished from
all current standards-track documents and online proposals (which I
believe all use keyed one-way cryptographic hash functions).
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