The project is managed by a worldwide community of volunteers that use the Internet to communicate, plan, and develop the OpenSSL toolkit and its related documentation. This process involves a secret key that is used to encrypt and later decrypt the data. Without the secret key, the encrypted data is meaningless. The result, text and MAC are then sent to the receiver which can verify the trial MAC appended to a message by recalculating the MAC for the message, using the appropriate secret key and verifying that it exactly equals the trial MAC . A digital signature assures the sender and receiver that the message is authentic and that only the owner of the key could have generated the digital signature.
Various companies hold various patents for various algorithms in various locations around the world.
This file contains some of the patents that we know about or are rumored to exist. RSA Data Security holds software patents on the RSA and RC5 algorithms. Before you decompress the tarballs, it is a good idea to make a list of files on the system before you install Openssl, and one afterwards, and then compare them using diff to find out what file it placed where.