News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Undisclosed hole in openssh on FreeBSD and Juniper?. Parent comment

Re:Undisclosed hole in openssh on FreeBSD and Juniper? by lholden on Friday April 11, 2014 @10:14AM (#7572931)
RSA was patent encumbered at the time the clause was made to the OpenSSH license. This very likely qualified RSA as "restrictively licensed". RSA was released from its patent in 2000 (just weeks before it expired).

DSA I believe is still patent encumbered.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Undisclosed hole in openssh on FreeBSD and Juniper? by peterwwillis on Friday April 11, 2014 @10:26AM (#7573006)
Right. They've had 14 years to re-add code like RSA and Diffie-Hellman to their project if they wanted to. Lazy programmers.

NIST made the DSA patent available worldwide royalty-free. In fact, DSA was unencumbered by patents before RSA, which is why SSH version 2 incorporated it.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Undisclosed hole in openssh on FreeBSD and Juniper? by lholden on Friday April 11, 2014 @10:55AM (#7573203)
Granted. Code reduction on the other hand is generally a good thing. :P

I want to say that I would have done the same thing. At the same time though... doing so with a security application assumes that the team supporting the software you depend on is competent enough to properly audit and test their code.

I have a feeling that OpenSSL will be leaving a bad taste in peoples mouths for a while. :/

[ Parent | on HN ]