This is preliminary support for an "RSA null" cipher. Unfortunately when

OpenSSL is compiled with NO_RSA, no RSA operations can be used: including
key generation storage and display of RSA keys. Since these operations are
not covered by the RSA patent (my understanding is it only covers encrypt,
decrypt, sign and verify) they can be included: this is an often requested
feature, attempts to use the patented operations return an error code.

This is enabled by setting RSA_NULL. This means that if a particular application
has its own legal US RSA implementation then it can use that instead by setting
it as the default RSA method.

Still experimental and needs some fiddling of the other libraries so they have
some options that don't attempt to use RSA if it isn't allowed.

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/CHANGES b/CHANGES
index 7f347f20e5..5083878993 100644
--- a/CHANGES
+++ b/CHANGES
@@ -4,6 +4,13 @@
 
  Changes between 0.9.4 and 0.9.5  [xx XXX 1999]
 
+  *) Preliminary compilation option RSA_NULL which disables RSA crypto without
+     removing all other RSA functionality (this is what NO_RSA does). This
+     is so (for example) those in the US can disable those operations covered
+     by the RSA patent while allowing storage and parsing of RSA keys and RSA
+     key generation.
+     [Steve Henson]
+
   *) Non-copying interface to BIO pairs.
      (still totally untested)
      [Bodo Moeller]