On Apr 24, 2009, at 10:34 AM, Felipe Alvarez wrote:
It's historical. Back in the late 1990s, the PGP developers were
offered a free patent license if they called it Diffie-Hellman. Now
that the patent has expired, though, it's a little hard to change
their product without confusing a bunch of customers who would see
their "Diffie-Hellman" keys suddenly become "Elgamal" keys.
David
[citation needed]??
Jon Callas, CTO of the PGP corporation. I'm afraid I don't have a URL
to point you to.
Note that this wasn't skullduggery of some sort or another. Whatever
the product calls it, it the same algorithm as specified in the
OpenPGP standard (that which we call a rose, by any other name would
smell as sweet). The patent holders (Cylink) simply wanted to push
the name Diffie-Hellman for marketing reasons. Back in the 1990s,
crypto was really hampered by patent problems, and I imagine a free
license would be a significant gift.
David
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