More patent questions

[D. J. Bernstein]

Google's NewHope experiment triggered a wave of NewHope variants,
including at least three submissions with new patent applications in
2016 and 2017: KCL/OKCN/AKCN/CNKE, Lizard, and Round2.

Have there been any in-depth analyses of the extent to which the patents
on those three submissions threaten other cryptosystems, such as NISTPQC
submissions currently under consideration for standardization?

KCL/OKCN/AKCN/CNKE listed two patent applications. Those were filed in
November 2016, a month before the publication of "NewHope without
reconciliation" (the Kyber predecessor), and turned into two patents in
China:

https://patents.google.com/patent/CN107566121A/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/CN108173643B/en

Lizard listed one patent application. This was also filed in November
2016, and turned into a patent in South Korea plus an application in the
U.S. with somewhat different claims (possibly still changing; a serious
analysis has to go through the whole patent file wrapper):

https://patents.google.com/patent/KR101905689B1/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200169384A1/en

Round2 listed several patent applications. These had various priority
dates, for example turning into the following patents filed in May 2017
and October 2017 respectively:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US11050557B2/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/EP3698515B1/en

None of these patents are as old as the main topics of pqc-forum patent
discussions, namely the patents from BIKE/HQC/RQC/Ouroborus and Ding Key
Exchange (U.S. patents 9094189 and 9246675), but all of these patents
predate the NISTPQC submission deadline and the publication of most
submissions.

---Dan