Known Patents
- Certicom holds a patent on efficient GF(2n) multiplication in normal basis representation.
- Certicom holds multiple patents which cover the MQV (Menezes, Qu, and Vanstone) key agreement technique.
- Certicom holds U.S. Patent 6,563,928 on technique of validating the key exchange messages using ECC to prevent a man-in-the middle attack
- Certicom holds U.S. Patent 6,141,420 on techniques for compressing elliptic curve point representations.
- Certicom holds U.S. Patent 6,782,100 on calculating the x-coordinate of the double of a point in binary curves via a Montgomery ladder in projective coordinates.
- US National Security Agency holds U.S. Patent 4,567,600, U.S. Patent 4,587,627, U.S. Patent 6,212,279, U.S. Patent 6,243,467 on efficient GF(2n) calculations in normal basis (terms of some patents have expired)
- RSA Data Security holds U.S. Patent 5,854,759 on efficient basis conversion
- Hewlett-Packard holds U.S. Patent 6,252,960 on compression and decompression of data points on elliptic curves
According to the NSA, Certicom holds over 130 patents relating to elliptic curves and public key cryptography in general .
It is difficult to create a complete list of patents which are related to ECC, but a good starting point is Standards for Efficient Cryptography Group (SECG) – a group devoted exclusively to developing standards based on ECC. There is controversy over the validity of some of the patent claims.
Read more about this topic: ECC Patents