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Fwd: Certicom IP Rights
Dear IPsec Working Group:
I just got this note, which is a follow-up to a query that I sent to
Certicom in July 2003.
I have asked Mr. McKinnon to post an updated IPR statement as soon as possible.
Russ
--- Original Message ---
To: housley@vigilsec.com
From: Ian McKinnon <IMcKinnon@certicom.com>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 15:14:09 -0500
Dear Mr. Housley:
First, let me apologize for not responding sooner on our our Intellectual
Property position re the August email stating that Certicom may have
certain IP rights covering some aspects of the proposed IKEv2 proposal
draft <draft-ietf-ipsec-ikev2-08.txt>. Our IP group was totally consumed
completing a $US 25 million IP licensing arrangement with the US
Governments National Security Agency for a subset of our intellectual
property portfolio for a limited field of use as it relates to its high
assurance initiatives.
We wish to advise the IETF that Certicom believes it has rights under
patents and/or pending applications that relate to RFC 3526 "More Modular
Exponential (MODP) Diffie-Hellman Groups for Internet Key Exchange (IKE)",
RFC 2409 "Internet Key Exchange", Internet Draft
(draft-ietf-ipsec-ikev2-11.txt) "Internet Key Exchange (IKEv2) Protocol"
and other IETF standards using MODP Groups. The applicable patents
include, but are not limited to, US Patents #5,933,504, #6,563,928,
#6,078,667, #6,178,507, #6,195,433, US Patent Application Publications
#2001/0014153, #2002/0090085, and PCT Application #WO 00/01109, and
corresponding foreign applications.
Some of the patents listed in the previous paragraph were part of the NSA
licensing arrangement discussed in paragraph 1 as they relate to elliptic
curve cryptography (ECC). For applications requiring higher levels of
security, we believe that one should consider ECC for the technological
advantages over other public-key schemes.
Certicom is willing to grant a royalty free license to the patents and
patent pending listed in paragraph 2 for the purpose of practicing the art
of public key cryptography as it pertains to IETF IKE standards in the
limited field of use of MODP public key cryptography implemented using the
well known Groups 1 and 2 as defined in RFC 2409. Certicom will send the
IETF terms of the royalty free license and will post this our web site shortly.
Outside the implementation of IETF IKE standards using well known Groups 1
and 2 Certicom is prepared to grant a license to such intellectual property
on reasonable, non-discriminatory terms and conditions, provided that the
licensee provides a similar grant for any relevant patents under their
control to Certicom.
Ian McKinnon
President and CEO
Certicom Corp