Fedora/Redhat and perfect forward secrecy

[Paul Wouters]

On Mon, 9 Sep 2013, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

> I am certainly not ignoring legal concerns. While there are some
> patented EC cryptographic techniques, the basic infrastructure
> including ECDH over prime fields was first published back in 1984 and
> is not patentable.
>
> The IETF has published an extensive RFC covering the foundations of
> ECC which carefully shows to-old-to-be-patentable direct citations:
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6090
>
> If Redhat is aware of a specific patent concern here, they're keeping
> it secret from the public. The continued claims that there are legal
> issues here behind basic support really don't make a lot of sense,
> especially considering the functionality in RHEL.

[not speaking for Red Hat]

You seem to believe only valid legal claims can put Red Hat in court.

> (I would also note that the support in RHEL somewhat oddly support
> _only_ the parameters from the NSA, which doesn't quite play into the
> expressed concern about backdoors)

[again not speaking for Red Hat, no idea of any arrangements]

I can come up with various commercial non-conspiracy theories for this.
For example, who pays the lawyers when a patent troll arrives.

Paul