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What Would You Do With a New Form of Encryption?
Kip Knight asks: "I've been sitting on an invention for six months now. I'm debating whether to 'give it to the world' or patent it. I would obviously like to feed my family on the fruits of my endeavour but don't see much hope in the open source route. My invention improves upon the 80 year old One-Time Pad encryption turning it into a 'Many-Time Pad'. Since I haven't got my export license to speak about the details yet, I won't describe further. The advantages are proof (i.e. unbreakable) against brute force attacks and known-plaintext attacks (unlike the OTP). The disadvantage is carrying around a very large digital key (which could easily fit on one of those USB memory key fobs). My question is this: Could I sell enough $10 shareware GPG extensions to compensate for not locking in 20 years of patent protection (and the $20,000 to patent it)?" While the claims made by the submittor have yet to withstand the crucial test of time (and prying eyes), if you had developed a new form of encryption, what would you do?
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... patent it, *then* you can figure out what business model you want to use.
Note, however, that the claims made by the submittor is basically a laundry list of the kinds of claims that makes seasoned cryptographers go "oh no, not again."
then encrypt the patent.
Notepad specialist & FAT administrator, group training available
Try to take over the world...
Fact is, if i need money, then liscense it to a company who will do the dirty work for me and live off the proceeds. If it is, in fact, a brilliant discovery, you should fight for provisions which will ensure some amount of open review.
Not everyone who comes up with such a proven idea is a software developer, and they may not be able to live off of creating cutting edge software or maintaining said software for a living. The bazaar method doesn't apply to theory.
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
I've been sitting on an invention for six months now.
Butt is a prior art, iirc.
Ten bucks says five mins after he publishes it it will get broken.
"many-time" otp are quite nonsense. See the problem is people think that good ciphers can have security approaching the OTP. The OTP is an absolutely different type of security.
For instance, *no* ammount of time is sufficient to break an OTP without the key. Whereas a block cipher can be broken at least in theory.
I'd suggest to the original poster that he try to get his design published. When it gets horribly broken it will serve as a learning experience as how "not" to approach science.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Don't do anything to make it public. Just keep it for your own personal use.
That would be the best encryption you can have. The one only you know about.
It's heartwarming that you've invented a new form of crypto. However, before anyone takes it seriously, you're going to have to reveal it to the cryptographic community. "Many eyes make bugs shallow" as they say, and in few places is this more important than in crypto. An algorithm you've looked at 10000 times may have a logical error you've never caught, that would be glaring to a knowledgable pair of fresh eyes.
Plus no self-respecting paranoid freak is ever going to use a new cipher that hasn't had any time in the spotlight. Release it to the field and ask for comments.
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
Yeah. Right. Let me guess. It's a one time pad, but one where the unused code groups get remapped/reused, which is just another type of one time pad.
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That this invention is a bunch of crap. Most likely scenario: inventor releases a press release that gets widely reported and the most secure thing ever invented. Claims like "unbreakable" and "proven secure" and "many time pad" will be thrown around freely.
And then someone with a decoder ring will crack that puppy wide open.
Yawn. Snake oil.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
First, I wouldn't "Ask Slashdot"
(sound of pitter-pattering many greedy feet scurrying to the nearest PTO)
Second:
1. Patent new encryption algorithm.
2. Sell to highest bidder.
3. ???
4. Profit.
Ah well, you could always be more philanthrophic than me, and support FSF, but hell, I'm just a capitalist at heart.
I think you should trade this patent for some stock in VA Systems! How could that fail to make you wealthy?!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
IF you patent the idea, you retain all rights to give it away freely, sell it or whatever, to whomever. If you don't you lose your rights over the invention.
I say patent it and then decide based on what offers you get. Once you patent it you can shop around for people to license it to. You can define the terms of the license (3 years and then you can offer it as GPL or NOT)
Don't be a fool, its your blood and sweat, you deserve to own it.
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From my somewhat scanty introduction to patent laws, you might want to be careful about how much you reveal about it before you file a patent or at least provisional paperwork. My company recently did work to patent a product and we were told we couldn't really discuss it with many people. Furthermore, doing an openly public action such as showing it at a trade show before applying the patent would seriously jeopardize the patent process. Now I'm not a lawyer or an expert in patent law, so I can't really say how valid an objection this is, but I'm sharing it here in case it's relevant. If it is correct, I want you to be able to decide whether to patent and not have it decided for you. (Any real experts have a better assessment).
Patent:
A grant made by a government that confers upon the creator of an invention the sole right to make, use, and sell that invention for a set period of time.
License:
Official or legal permission to do or own a specified thing. See Synonyms at permission.
I would patent it, then license it. It could be licensed for free use to non-profit groups, and governments could be required to pay a yearly sum.
But that sounds almost too easy to me :)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Patenting something (properly) will cost thousands of dollars and will require a patent lawyer.
The US is a first-to-invent not a first-to-patent country, so make sure you have a hardcopy of your invention description dated and notarized.
Then let some Net crypto people beat on your idea, make sure you say "Patent Pending."
If it holds up, you should easily be able to raise the money to get it patented properly. (Actually, if so, email me, I may know a few investors)
Judging from your description, I'd say your invention has a high probability of not truly doing what you think it does. Developing novel and useful cryptographic technology is a rare occurance, generally done by people who have a ton of experience in the area. No point in wasting money if it won't stand up to 30 minutes in sci.crypt
My invention improves upon the 80 year old One-Time Pad encryption turning it into a 'Many-Time Pad'.
Information theory proves that the One-Time Pad (OTP) is optimal - it cannot be improved.
The advantages are proof (i.e. unbreakable) against brute force attacks and known-plaintext attacks (unlike the OTP).
The OTP has no known-plaintext vulnerability. By submitting even a chosen plaintext to be encrypted, and studying the encrypted message, you only learn the piece of the One-Time pad used on your own content. It does not help you break any other part of any other message.
The only way to break a OTP is to get a copy the pad or by breaking the random number generator used to create the pad.
This post's claim is the usual nonsense. So patent it if you wish - release it if you wish - I doubt anyone will find it usable.
It is impossible to make money selling a cryptographic algorithm. It's difficult, but not impossible, to make money selling a cryptographic protocol.
Who said it? Bruce Schneier, one of the current gurus of crypto. Where did he say it? Here on Slashdot
The whole article is worth a read.
My perspective is that I seriously doubt your claims. Until there is strong peer review of your entire cryptosystem from top to bottom, I won't touch it. Unless it solves some problem with other cryptosystems already in use, the market won't touch it. If you can these two objections then you might have a shot at some money. Otherwise...
There are tons of symmetric encryption methods ranging from patented to totally free. They all have the property of being effectively unbreakable with decent keysizes. Unlike your proposed method, they dont require ridiculously large keysizes. I really dont see the commercial potential, or even the potential for significant non-commercial use.
The method you describe would actually have significant *disadvantages*, such as being ill-suited for use with asymmetric cyphers.
The advantages are proof (i.e. unbreakable) against brute force attacks and known-plaintext attacks (unlike the OTP).
I dont see how a one time pad wouldnt have these properties. Note that the name is One Time Pad, so if you reuse the pad, its not one time anymore.
Just because you patent the information, does not mean that it cannot be made available to the Open Source community. There is plenty of software out there that is available for free for personal use, but requires licensing for business use.
/.'ers for $20 each.. I know I'll be more than happy to help!
Patenting the software will ensure that *YOU* get some of that dough, while ensuring that *YOU* decide how it is going to be used, and who will use it. If you do not patent it, chances are that someone else will figure out a way to patent something extremely similar to it, and then charge *YOU* to use your software.
If you need some help with the $20k, let me know. I am almost sure you can raise it by asking 1000
---
Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
The first thing I would do is change my ISP/e-mail address.. no one is going to believe you with your current AOL one.
1. Sign a non-disclosure agreement with a reputable encryption expert.
...
2. Pay said expert a fee to examine your system and comment on its merit.
3. If your system has potential but needs adjustment, repeat #1 and #2 as necessary, if possible with different experts (within the limits of your financial resources, of course).
4. If you are still convinced that your system is worthy, hire a patent lawyer and patent it.
5. Don't try to sell it on your own. Instead, try selling it to an encryption firm or software distributor, using the expert opinions from #1 and #2 to bolster your sales pitch.
6. If you find a buyer, try to license your encryption system rather then sell it outright.
7.
8. Profit!
- Talk to a lawyer and tell him that you have an idea. If it REALLY IS a good idea, the small investment in a good IP lawyer at that point is a good thing.
The idea still needs community work and approval, but you still want to retain ownership should the idea succeed. He should advise you that a patent is a bad idea at that point, a better idea would be one of many publication or trade secret options.
- Talk with the community. Post everything about it to all the crypto newsgroups. Get the routines published in the proper community forums and conferences. If it is good enough it will make it into any of the IEEE or ACM conferences. Encourage feedback. That cannot be stressed enough. ANY GOOD SECURITY MECHINISM, PATENTED OR PUBLIC, MUST HAVE ALL ITS PARTS STUDIED CAREFULLY BY EXPERTS. There is no way around that.
- Write and publish the extensions. Write the GPG extension, and extensions for the Windows shell, and Outlook, and Eudora, and Pegasus, and everything else. If it doesn't get adopted it won't matter if you patent it since it won't get used.
- If at the end of the year it looks profitable, patent it. Your lawyer should have told you that also. If you know that it won't be possible to recoup the money, don't do it.
So that should answer the original question: "Could I sell enough $10 shareware GPG extensions to compensate for not locking in 20 years of patent protection (and the $20,000 to patent it)?" If at the end of the first year you haven't made a dime and haven't had the routine published or accepted in the community, you probably never will.frob.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Does it bother anyone else that the creator of the encryption scheme that will save the world uses AOL? (check his email addy...)
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but there have been a lot of great mathematicians and cryptographers that have tried to design good, secure algorithms over the past few decades. Very few have actually managed to create algorithms that'll stand up under analysis. You may think you've done so, but it's going to take a lot to convince everyone of that.
Be who you are...and be it in style!
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But how did you get the monkeys to wear the pants?
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
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How dare you insult my mother like that!
Table-ized A.I.
The chances of making money out of a patent are slim. Moreover, the cryptography market is "canibalized" - even if your system is, as you claim, a lot better than the existing techniques, most people will still use something that stood the test of time (e.g. RSA, which has become free)
Anyway, the US Patent system allows you to publish your idea one year before you file for a patent. Get some peer reviews (a proof is simply not a proof if kept secret) before embarking on a patent adventure.
The Raven
There's even a better method that has been discussed for years. Document everything. Mail it to yourself. The postmark is sufficient proof of the date.
It doesn't matter if you intend to make a product or wait until someone else uses your best kept secret. If you plan to ramp up a production line to pump out your products and are sued by someone who finally does (and will) get a patent on your idea, just show them the evidence. Rather than having their patent nullified due to prior art, they will give you cash to shut up. Same if someone else makes it and they happened to patent it. Threaten to sell your prior art to others. Hush money will come your way (or someone will come over to fit you with a pair of concrete shoes.)
You can be assured this will happen. The introduction of new technology makes new obvious things possible. Its a race with time. Better put the cards in your pocket and hide them until the dealer has a lot of cash on the table.
But I don't think your comment really relates to the actual question he asked: do I patent [thing x] and hope to make enough money in a commercial world, or do I release shareware plugins?
frob.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this.
A provisional patent costs $85, and you don't need a lawyer. It essentially keeps your patent claim alive for one year, and establishes a filing date, allowing you to disclose the invention without (as much) fear of losing your rights.
Once you assess it's commercial viability, you can decide on the >$10k formal patent.
I've done this many times. It's definitely the way to go.
Quote
Memo to the Amateur Cipher Designer
Congratulations. You've just invented this great new cipher, and you want to do something with it. You're new in the field; no one's heard of you, and you don't have any credentials as a cryptanalyst. You want to get well-known cryptographers to look at your work. What can you do?
Unfortunately, you have a tough road ahead of you. I see about two new cipher designs from amateur cryptographers every week. The odds of any of these ciphers being secure are slim. The odds of any of them being both secure and efficient are negligible. The odds of any of them being worth actual money are virtually non-existent.
Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break. It's not even hard. What is hard is creating an algorithm that no one else can break, even after years of analysis. And the only way to prove that is to subject the algorithm to years of analysis by the best cryptographers around.
"The best cryptographers around" break a lot of ciphers. The academic literature is littered with the carcasses of ciphers broken by their analyses. But they're a busy bunch; they don't have time to break everything. How do they decide what to look at?
Ideally, cryptographers should only look at ciphers that have a reasonable chance of being secure. And since anyone can create a cipher that he believes to be secure, this means that cryptographers should only look at ciphers created by people whose opinions are worth something. No one is impressed if a random person creates an cipher he can't break; but if one of the world's best cryptographers creates an cipher he can't break, now that's worth looking at.
The real world isn't that tidy. Cryptographers look at algorithms that are either interesting or are likely to yield publishable results. This means that they are going to look at algorithms by respected cryptographers, algorithms fielded in large public systems (e.g., cellular phones, pay-TV decoders, Microsoft products), and algorithms that are published in the academic literature. Algorithms posted to Internet newsgroups by unknowns won't get a second glance. Neither will patented but unpublished algorithms, or proprietary algorithms embedded in obscure products.
It's hard to get a cryptographic algorithm published. Most conferences and workshops won't accept designs from unknowns and without extensive analysis. This may seem unfair: unknowns can't get their ciphers published because they are unknowns, and hence no one will ever see their work. In reality, if the only "work" someone ever does is in design, then it's probably not worth publishing. Unknowns can become knowns by publishing cryptanalyses of existing ciphers; most conferences accept these papers.
When I started writing _Applied Cryptography_, I heard the maxim that the only good algorithm designers were people who spent years analyzing existing designs. The maxim made sense, and I believed it. Over the years, as I spend more time doing design and analysis, the truth of the maxim has gotten stronger and stronger. My work on the Twofish design has made me believe this even more strongly. The cipher's strength is not in its design; anyone could design something like that. The strength is in its analysis. We spent over 1000 man-hours analyzing Twofish, breaking simplified versions and variants, and studying modifications. And we could not have done that analysis, nor would we have had any confidence in that analysis, had not the entire design team had experience breaking many other algorithm designs.
A cryptographer friend tells the story of an amateur who kept bothering him with the cipher he invented. The cryptographer would break the cipher, the amateur would make a change to "fix" it, and the cryptographer would break it again. This exchange went on a few times until the cryptographer became fed up. When the amateur visited him to hear what the cryptographer thought, the cryptographer put three envelopes face down on the table. "In each of these envelopes is an attack against your cipher. Take one and read it. Don't come back until you've discovered the other two attacks." The amateur was never heard from again.
I don't mean to be completely negative. People occasionally design strong ciphers. Amateur cryptographers even design strong ciphers. But if you are not known to the cryptographic community, and you expect other cryptographers to look at your work, you have to do several things:
1. Describe your cipher using standard notation. This doesn't mean C code. There is established terminology in the literature. Learn it and use it; no one will learn your specialized terminology.
2. Compare your cipher with other designs. Most likely, it will use some ideas that have been used before. Reference them. This will make it easier for others to understand your work, and shows that you understand the literature.
3. Show why your cipher is immune against each of the major attacks known in literature. It is not good enough just to say that it is secure, you have to show why it is secure against these attacks. This requires, of course, that you not only have read the literature, but also understand it. Expect this process to take months, and result in a large heavily mathematical document. And remember, statistical tests are not very meaningful.
4. Explain why your cipher is better than existing alternatives. It makes no sense to look at something new unless it has clear advantages over the old stuff. Is it faster on Pentiums? Smaller in hardware? What? I have frequently said that, given enough rounds, pretty much anything is secure. Your design needs to have significant performance advantages. And "it can't be broken" is not an advantage; it's a prerequisite.
5. Publish the cipher. Experience shows that ciphers that are not published are most often very weak. Keeping the cipher secret does not improve the security once the cipher is widely used, so if your cipher has to be kept secret to be secure, it is useless anyway.
6. Don't patent the cipher. You can't make money selling a cipher. There are just too many good free ones. Everyone who submitted a cipher to the AES is willing to just give it away; many of the submissions are already in the public domain. If you patent your design, everyone will just use something else. And no one will analyze it for you (unless you pay them); why should they work for you for free?
7. Be patient. There are a lot of algorithms to look at right now. The AES competition has given cryptographers 15 new designs to analyze, and we have to pick a winner by Spring 2000. Any good cryptographer with spare time is poking at those designs.
If you want to design algorithms, start by breaking the ones out there. Practice by breaking algorithms that have already been broken (without peeking at the answers). Break something no one else has broken. Break another. Get your breaks published. When you have established yourself as someone who can break algorithms, then you can start designing new algorithms. Before then, no one will take you seriously.
Creating a cipher is easy. Analyzing it is hard.
See "Self-Study Course in Block Cipher Cryptanalysis": http://www.counterpane.com/self-study.html
A) Patenting requires a few thousand dollars easily. Questionable value if what you have turns out to be valueless.
B) The fundimental building blocks for crypto these days are all patent free: You have free hashes, free block cyphers (AES), free public key (RSA). There is no reason for someone theses days to choose a patent-entangled encryption primitive.
C) A one time pad is not vulnerable to known plaintext. I don't know what the poster is talking about. Since one time pads are never reused, the known plaintext tells NO information about the rest of the pad.
D) For the US, you can publish THEN patent, you do have a year between when there is a public disclosure and when you can patent it. This does NOT apply to non-US patents. But since the US is at least half the market, who cares about the rest?
D is really critical, because the post does raise many "snake oil" warning flags. If it's NOT snake oil, he can disclose it and patent it after people at least get a look at it. If it IS snake-oil, then it can be shot down before spending the k$s needed to patent it.
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A commercial? What a gip!
The intersection of the sets {AOL users, guys named Kip, actual inventors} is null.
Where does the vegetarian pirana fit in to the algorithm?
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Create a little tune and lyrically read your patent submission, any source code, and detailed description of your technology. Then the MPAA's actions will cover you. ROT-13 it and the DMCA will also cover you especially if you also distribute decoder rings with your developer's package (pricing and availability not specified at press time)
I seriously doubt you've found anything substantial that some of the worlds greatest mathematical minds just sort of 'passed over'. I mean, seriously. It's been proven that the only secure encryption technique is OTP. You could no more have come up with something more secure then I could add 2 + 2 and end up with 64,000.
Finally, you can actually both "give it to the world" and "make money". In fact, the whole point of the patent system is to get people to give out their secrets by granting them a limited monopoly.
If you really have something worth while, you can simply license you're concepts for general use. Public Key crypto has been patented for 30 years (almost expired) but it's used everywhere and has been a great boon to secure communications. Why? Because the authors licensed it for reasonable rates and allowed it to be used for free.
Patents only cost about $700, and once you get one it's yours for the next N years (or whatever, not sure about the exact number of years, it may be different in different fields). You can still let people use it for N-1 years and then try to get money out of it in year N (see the Unisys GIF patent). Patents aren't like trademarks where you have to keep policing them or you lose them, despite what morons on Slashdot (such as Hemos, even... btw whatever happened to him?) seem to believe.
One other thing:
The advantages are proof (i.e. unbreakable) against brute force attacks and known-plaintext attacks (unlike the OTP).
If I'm reading this right, you seem to think OTP is susceptible to brute force attacks. If this is true, you basically know jack about encryption.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
... name the algorithm threefish, then sell the patent and name to Microsoft, then watch Counterpane sue them and then read Bruce add another reason to hate Microsoft security on Crypto-Gram, like he does every other issue.
Encryption is the ability to spread a limited source of entropy over a broad amount of data. The One Time Pad simply recognizes that if you have equal amounts of entropy and data then you don't need a very good mixing algorithm; just XOR the data with the pad and voila, the data becomes unreadable.
The challenge of good algorithms is to limit the amount of entropy needed to generate unreadable text to as small a size as possible. Typical algorithms in use today will by changing a single bit in the key, ultimately flip about 50% of the encrypted output. Half of the bits is optimum. Fewer and your entropy isn't getting mixed in very well. More and your bit is just inverting the data.
If you really want to contribute to the world of cryptography, don't bother with encryption algorithms. The ones we have are quite good. Honestly. Instead you should try to figure out a new use for the basic operations in cryptography. We know how to protect content, add signatures, authenticate content, and do non-repudiation. We can encrypt for a small number of readers each with his own key, or for broadcast, we can build webs of trust, and hierarchies. Come up with a new use that makes as much business sense as digital signatures and you'll have something worth patenting.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
It sounds a lot like a classic blunder, and not a new encryption at all.
.sig
But assuming for the moment that one discovers a new kind of encryption,
the question becomes why is this new encryption better than the hundreds of existing algorithms.
Rijndael is libre, approved by FIPS, has reference implementations available,
and has been thoroughly checked by several cryptographers.
If the only difference your encryption scheme has is a (possibly flawed) proof of security,
then you have a "me too" product that's competing in saturated market place.
You best bet is probably to go for fame, and then try to turn that fame into a better paying job.
-- this is not a
I'm not going to jail for you, or you, or anybody!
...Now all we need to do is combine this Infinate One Time Pad idea with the Infinate Compression Algoritm and well have an Infinate amount of Libraries Of Congress stored securly in only obe bit!
Wow!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
What you are suggesting has been done since the 70's at least.
Various entities create one-time pads based on cosmic waves or the behavior of radioactive items. They then produce a large pad and then re-use for a specified number of times by manipulating it with various algorithims. The algorithms are sent in a seperate one-time pad.
All of the major ideas in encyrption have existed for decades or centuries. Future advances will come algorithms that deliver degrees of randomness. Future flaws encyptions will come from subtle errors in those algorithims.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
All I got from that was: "You're gonna shoot your eye out".
*shrugs*
In case anyone is scratching their head at this...
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Banya: THAT'S GOLD JERRY!!!! ...GOLD!!!!
Berto
Ah, I see. And you can prove that the "nine out of ten slashdotters" who complain about the abuse of the patent system, are in fact the same people that are suggesting he patent it now? That's the assertion you're making, but you haven't backed it up. Slashdot is a community of thousands of people, some of whom have opposing views, but you assume that because you saw two opposing things on the same website, it must be the same people. Your logic is truly astonishing.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Just go to the bank you do business with and get a $20,000 loan. If you have a decent credit rating, it should be no problem at all. You could also take out a loan against your 401(k), or even a home equity loan. Rates are great right now. The point is, there's no reason to involve a third party who has an interest in your invention, just to get the funds to patent it.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Say you managed to discover an algorithm that made factoring easy, to the degree that cyphers dependent on the intractability of factoring would be completely compromised. What would you do with with this extremely dangerous information?
The only reasonable action I could think of is to anonymously (through a dozen anonymous remailers) email a description of the algorithm to Bruce Schneier, entrusting him to proceed with this knowledge in whatever way he finds most prudent. I surely wouldn't want to be associated with the discovery and the calamity that would follow, and somehow I feel like Bruce Scheier could be trusted to act responsibly and intelligently.
Release it freely. If it is actually good (or can be made good), use it to become famous, and find employment on that fame. Don't bother spending money patenting it because that would be a waste of money.
First, because there is no shortage of really good encryption available for free, you aren't going to be able to sell it.
Second, because it doesn't work, there is no point in wasting money trying to patent something that is faulty.
How do I know it doesn't work? Because nearly no one can design good cryptography, so chances are yours isn't any good either. And, yours is currently secret; secret cryptography is almost poor. Sure, you might be not be able to see how it is defective, but that only means it is tougher than your ability as a cryptanalyst. Good cryptanalysts are rare. You also seem to say that OTP is vulnerable to known-plaintext attacks, which as I understand it is simply false. A OTP has terrible key distribution problems and there are always attacks outside the strict domain of the encryption, but a one time pad is, if you define the problem as a narrow cryptographic problem, perfect. This makes me doubt your abilities.
Sorry to be so harsh,
-kb, the Kent who tries to know how much he doesn't know about cryptography.
I would do exactly the same. I'd ask Slashdot!
This sig is a true statement, but I cannot prove it.
There is a little known loophole in the filing of patents that allows you to mail your idea to them. Once the letter arrives, you have 2 years to file the patent for your idea (that is just the submission, not the entire process).
This loophole exists for people like you who have an idea, but are not willing to pay a patent lawyer without testing it.
PS: This is my first slashdot post, so please be kind...
Well, since this is crypto related, I think an even better way would be to use the PGP Timestamping Service.
It has several different modes, but basically you just encrypt your ideas, send an email to the timestamper with the encrypted files and it will sign the file, and the signature will contain a timestamp and a serial number.
The signatures are available on a daily basis and are posted weekly at alt.security.pgp for all the world to see.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Your description sounds like the classic descrption of what Bruce Schneider calls "snake oil". You have a great new encryption algorithm that you've been sitting on.... If you've been sitting on it, nobody knows if it's any good. The best cryptographers don't really know if their algorithm is really any good until lots of other cryptographers have had time to beat on it and test it. The only algorithms that anybody with any sense will use are ones that have been open, and for a long time, so that they can truly be scrutinized.
So, in a word, it doesn't matter. I'd rather you didn't patent it, because software patents are generally evil anyway, and if the algorithm turns out to be useful for something, it could create headaches later. But, as far as cryptography goes, if it is truly as you describe, it's effectively worthless at the moment, and will continue to be so until lots of people have had a chance to see and work on the algorithm.
-Rob
it doesn't work. forging mail is sooo easy and it would never hold up in court.
there is a way to copyright your stuff cheaply involving a notary -- basically you give the notary a copy and they hang on to it for you. notarys are like government approved honest people.
back to the forging the self-mailing thing -- to forge:
1. mail an empty envelope to yourself with weak tape sealing the flap
2. hang on to envelope for 10 years
3. place patented material in envelope and seal
4. forgery complete, sue for prior art.
other possibilities include steaming open your sealed envelope and replacing the contents.
a visit to the notary usually costs less than $20.
fear is the mind killer
1) Read everything Nolo provides regarding patents and trade secrets.
2) Patent it yourself.
3) Prepare an iron clad NDA/Trade Secret plan yourself.
4) Have a specalist lawyer bullet proof your NDA/Trade secret plan.
5) Hire a lawyer under your bullet proof trade secret plan
6) Hire someone who knows how to start a company while you help protect your ownership rights to your invention under your bullet proof plan.
7) Sell your super product
8) After you have earned enough money for you and your family, take some of the excess cash and pay lawyers to help you find ways to start a patent sharing scheme that grants people license to use your patent if they grant you rights to the inventions they create based on it.
9) If the company you found turns out to bite you make sure there is a poison pill where you as the inventor can open the invention free to the world without negative consequences.
Most importantly, ASK PHIL ZIMMERMAN FOR HELP EVEN IF YOU MUST BEG HIM OR BRIBE HIM. He's been there, and got screwed. Doubtless he learned something about how he would do it the second time around. You see he knows more about this than us Slashdotters.
BTW, if you are looking to hire an experienced software developer or just getting started at project management type. I need a damn job and you need a Gantt for your project. Just kidding, sorta.
~~ What's stopping you?
If this guy thinks the known-plaintext "attack" to OTP is a problem, then he don't know what a OTP is.
For those of you who don't know, every byte in a one-time pad is used to encrypt one and only one byte. Ever. If you know the plaintext and the ciphertext, you can derive the key, for that one byte, but that information is useless for every other byte in the ciphertext.
This probably applies to any cryptosystem, BTW. ;)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Aside from the fact that the claim is incredible...
As other posters point out, everyone can develop their own ciphers that they think is unbreakable. It's not until massive peer review for many years before they become trusted as unbreakable, and thusly become of any value.
Attempting to patent a cipher before this is a waste of money, and patenting it after peer review is likely impossible.
Put it out for public scrutiny. At least you'll hold the copyright on the reference implementation and be recognized as the inventor, and don't blow $20,000+ just to have someone tell you your cipher is bogus/duplicate/pathetic. :)