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The patent office specifically looked at Signal and other implementations and states that the Examiner "has been unable to locate prior art that would suggest t
by hcknwscommenter 7y ago
The patent office specifically looked at Signal and other implementations and states that the Examiner "has been unable to locate prior art that would suggest that the device sending a message in a particular epoch require its own private key in generation of the shared first refresh key and first state with the recipient device. Although using public keys to securely transmit data is known in the art . . . ." The patent Applicant states "Sarafa fails to [suggest each and every step of] 'generating on the first device, a first epoch key . . . transmitting, from the first device, the first epoch key . . . generating, independently on each of the first device and the second device, a first refresh key . . . *wherein the first refresh key is generated on the first device without requiring a private key corresponding to the first epoch key"
- matthewdgreen 7y agoI haven’t read the specification carefully enough yet to determine what they mean by “refresh key” since that’s not really a standard term of art. If this could refer to a Diffie-Hellman ephemeral, then said key would be generated without requiring a separate private key corresponding to the epoch key, something that’s also not really a standard term. My concern with patents like this is that, since many of the terms are non-standard and thus defined by the specification, any vagueness in the spec leaves room for future interpretations in an infringement case that may, in fact, lead to de facto Signal implementations being found to infringe. ETA: I’ll read the spec later this weekend and see how they define all these terms.