Re: [TCLUG:19127] SSH Clients

[Karen A Swanberg <swanberg@tc.umn.edu>]

Ok, after doing some searching, and after significant help from friends, I
found the skinny on all of this. Prior to this year, according to a
friend:

"Disclaimer...I'm no lawyer.  Contact one for a definitive answer.

The issues with ssh/ssh2 are all about patents on some of the algorithms
used by the servers and clients.  The patents are/were held by some
combination of RSA, and the couple of folks that worked for RSA (namely,
the R and S, I believe).  RSA was kind enough to release a programming
toolkit called RSAREF that was licensed such that individuals and
non-profit organizations could use it for free.  However, commercial
entities were expected to buy (for a large sum of money) a commerical
toolkit (called BSAFE, I think).

Patents are tricky business, though.  If you are an individual or
non-profit entitiy residing in a juristiction covered by US pataent
law, you can only run RSA patented routines from the RSAREF toolikt.
You cannot, for example, run the freely available and more efficient
international, indepentantly written routines as that violates the RSA
patent (this goes for OpenSSH too, BTW...if you live in a US patent
juristiction, you need to use RSAREF libs even with OpenSSH2)."


But in March (and I had completely missed this), in response to the DDOS
attacks, "SSH and SANS have granted every accredited university in the
United States an unlimited, no-cost license for use of encryption software
[secure shell 2.1] that eliminates clear-text transmission and provides
encrypted file transfer." (from 
http://www.ssh.com/about/press/release01032000.html and
http://www.ssh.com/products/ssh/universities.html)

Sorry, Peter, you were obviously right.
Hey, cool, I'm happy to be completely wrong on this one!

-Karen

On Mon, 26 Jun 2000, Karen A Swanberg wrote:

> 
> Peter Lukas <peter@math.umn.edu> wrote
> >Universities and non-profit orgs are exempt from the patent and copyright
> >issues in SSH (and SSH2).
> 
> >Peter Lukas
> 
> Er, are you absolutely sure about this? I don't mean to doubt you, but SSH
> is a frequent topic at the netpeople meetings, and this has never come up.
> SSH is highly recommended by NTS, but they've been clear in saying that
> the patented versions are still illegal to use here. If they're incorrect,
> I'm sure we'd all be thrilled to know we can go with the patented versions
> and be legal. We do have a site licence for the commercial version
> (http://www1.umn.edu/adcs/site/list.html)
> 
> Can you post some links about who's legal to use the patented versions?
> 
> (sorry for the slow response, I'm on digest...)
> 
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