Are SHA-1, SHA-2 patented?

Question

Do you need a license to use SHA-1 or SHA-2 for commercial purposes?

Answer 1

Neither SHA-1 nor SHA-2 are patented or protected by any such intellectual property. You can use them freely for any purpose. NIST (which is the US federal agency that standardized SHA-1 and SHA-2) actually holds an open competition to select the next standard hash function (tentatively called “ SHA-3 ”), and the explicit requirement for candidates is that in in the event of their final choice, they should be stripped of any patent or copyright or anything else. SHA-3 will be used as freely as SHA-1 and SHA-2.

Answer 2

It was originally created by the NSA for secure DSA Encryptions, and then adopted by NIST to support all aspects of the algorithm. Together with SHA (2 and 3).

It is a free “as is” algorithm and is widely used in DSA Encryptions

contains the RFC in the system.

http://www.itl.nist.gov/fipspubs/fip180-1.htm

Answer 3

No, you do not.

Answer 4

I do not think so. SHA-1 was published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and is available to all.