Wow wasn't aware of that. Its funny to hear and agree with people proclaiming "privacy a right" and have the basic, fundamental technology behind make hairy the implementation of it.
If you run "openssl ecparam -list_curves" on a RHEL clone, you will only see p-256, p-384, and e-521 (and e-521 was only added in v7).
If you build libressl and run the same command, there are dozens (and Canada doesn't allow software patents, so it's legal there).
On OpenBSD 7.1, I see this result:
$ openssl ecparam -list_curves | wc -l
102
Here's a Canadian patent on accelerated finite field operations on an elliptic curve [2]. Here's one on public key cryptography using elliptic curves [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_Canadia...
[2] https://brevets-patents.ic.gc.ca/opic-cipo/cpd/eng/patent/23...
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=319901#c2
Tomas Mraz 2007-10-05 10:23:00 UTC: "They are intentionally removed due to possible patent issues."
Bill McGonigle 2013-04-11 06:26:53 UTC: "I've read that Sun's ECC code (that went to OpenSSL) was developed to specifically avoid Certicom patents, but I've only seen that asserted, not proven."
Jan-Frode Myklebust 2013-10-07 09:18:49 UTC: "Is this now solved in the RHEL6.5 beta... only the nistp256 and nistp384 curves are supported."