Do you use HTTPS? Then pay. A small company is suing major corporations.

AT & T and Yahoo !, Netflix, GoPro, Sony - all of these companies are now defendants in a patent infringement case for encryption. The fact is that in May, a small company CryptoPeak Solutions, operating in Texas, received at its disposal a patent 6202150 . The patent describes the work of a special kind of cryptosystems based on elliptic curves.



Now CryptoPeak is looking for TLS-protected sites that use elliptic curve cryptography, and is suing the companies that own these sites. Thus, CryptoPeak is trying to sue almost all owners of HTTPS sites using the ECC. And this technology uses the majority of site owners.



Starting in July, CryptoPeak began suing giants such as AT & T, Priceline, Pinterest, Hyatt Hotels, Best Western, and Experia. Now the company is already in litigation with 70 companies. CryptoPeak requires damages, deductions and legal fees. Here you can familiarize yourself with one of the lawsuits, the defendant of which is Progressive. Date of filing a claim - November 25. The lawsuit states that “the defendant, by its actions, using sites with TLS and ECC, violates the patent law”.

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The patent was drafted by cryptographer Adam Young (Adam Young) Marcel Yung (Marcel Yung), the patent was obtained by the authors in 1997. It describes, in particular, the process of generating public keys, as well as the publication of public keys. Elliptic curve-based cryptography actually uses the generation of public keys, and also works with these keys.



But the central part of the patent is not the ECC, but the private process of working with public and private keys. However, the company CryptoPeak, which received this patent, now focuses on the ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography).



Apparently, we are talking about the usual patent trolls, who are trying to sue the largest technology companies of our time, in order to get compensation or get money in court.