CDRLabs.com

The patents-in-suit are two of Certicom's fundamental patents used in consumer electronics, in particular its world-leading version of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). In its complaint, Certicom alleges Sony has, and continues to, infringe, contribute to and induce the infringement of Certicom's patents by making, using, importing, offering for sale and selling their products in the U.S. without being licensed by Certicom to do so. These patents are related to content protection technologies, including Advanced Access Control System (AACS) used in Blu-ray and Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP) used in wired and wireless distribution of compression audio and video. Products affected include Playstation 3, DVD players, VAIO personal computers and certain high definition TV models and audio equipment.

Rather than try to reduce the size of public keys, ECC borrows from the notion that both these primes can be represented as points on an elliptic curve. The curve can then be represented by geometric coordinates, in such a way that any point on the curve multiplied by an integer will yield another point on the same curve. So once the formula knows how to interpret the curve, an algorithm can derive the primes involved in the cryptographic calculations, which also fall on that curve.

The underlying math is perhaps centuries old, and Certicom itself offers a public tutorial on elliptic curves on its own Web site.

Certicom apparently patented the concept of elliptic curve mathematics in cryptography as soon as it could following the first suggestion of its use in 1985, by a fellow Certicom admits worked for IBM at the time. It since filed subsequent patents on variations of its use, including #6,563,928, "Strengthened public key protocol," which describes the use of exponentiation as a technique for placing the very large numbers required for high-bit cryptography into a smaller, more manageable group.

Wesociety wrote:Yeah, it sounds pretty absurd that a mathematical concept can be patented. What's next, a patent on using multiplication with encryption? Oh wait, that's pretty much what they patented...