How Will Applications Change with RSA Unpatented?

theholyboot wrote in asking: "Now that the RSA algorithm has been released, are there any new applications, or updates that will incorporate it? I'm specifically curious about mod_ssl and RSAREF." Interesting thought. Now that RSA is out in the open, what will we see happen in terms of cryptography in free software?

Re:Will RSA expiry change the world? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, ElGamal didn't go into the public domain in 1997. It's pretty much been in the public domain since its first publication. However, few people have dared to use it.

Why? Because the Diffie-Hellman patent holders believed that the Diffie-Hellman patent covered the entire CONCEPT of public-key encryption. It was never really tested in courts, though, because nobody wanted to go up against such deep pockets. The general concensus, though, is that ElGamal *wasn't* covered under the patent.

So, no ElGamal didn't go into the public domain in 1997. But the expiry of DH made it less encumbered from a legal standpoint.

As a side note: ElGamal isn't as widely used as RSA. Earlier SSH versions, as well as earlier PGP versions, were strictly RSA. That means that there are still a FEW incompatibility problems between "Free" versions and licensed versions of some applications.

So what can you expect? Better RSA support in GPG, maybe. OpenBSD will now ship with RSA included. There will be fewer problems making "Free" software compatible with commercial software. As well, commercial software won't require expensive licenses. So prices might decrease slightly for RSA-based crypto programs (though I doubt it).

The nice thing...

[Tower]

is that mozilla will have SSL support now:

<from the Mozilla Crypto FAQ>
1.Have all the issues with Mozilla and crypto now been resolved?

Almost. Now that the RSA patent is in the public domain, Mozilla crypto development can proceed with minimal restrictions. In the near future the Mozilla code base will include a complete open source cryptographic library, and Mozilla will include SSL support as a standard feature.

(no need to moderate this comment up)
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Will RSA expiry change the world? No.

[rjh]

Simply put, there already existed other alternatives to RSA, provably just-as or more secure than RSA, which were unencumbered by patents. (The most notable would be El Gamal, which went into the public domain in 1997.)

While we'll see legal Free Software versions of SSL in the near future, I really don't think the expiry of the RSA patent is going to make that much of a sea change in the Free Software community. In the commercial community it'll make a big change, but not so much in the Free Software sector.

Re:Will RSA expiry change the world? No.

[DaveHowe]

Simply put, there already existed other alternatives to RSA, provably just-as or more secure than RSA, which were unencumbered by patents. (The most notable would be El Gamal, which went into the public domain in 1997.)
This is of course true - but RSA is popular and is easy to explain to a non-techie; However, it may be worth noting that RSA has *always* been free outside of America - however, the other part of "classic" PGP (IDEA) is still patented worldwide, and will be for several years yet.
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Re:SSL in public domain, stronghold owned by redha

[igaborf]

Since Stronghold is Apache+mod_ssl (OpenSSL), isn't it already open? C2Net never added any substantive code. The only reason to ever purchase Stronghold was the need to have an RSA license.

I found it amusing that in the past 2 months C2Net was frantically trying to get its customers to upgrade to Stronghold 3, just before the RSA patent was due to expire. Guess they wanted to milk the upgrade cow one more time before dying.

SSL in public domain, stronghold owned by redhat

[danpbrowning]

With SSL in the public domain, and C2Net (makers of #1 popular Stronghold) purchased by RedHat, what will happen to Stronghold? Will Stronghold be released open source? (please say yes).