warp/PATENTS.md

PATENTS — Lux Warp Cross-Chain Messaging

Statement of Intellectual Property and Royalty-Free Patent Grant for the Lux Warp cross-chain messaging protocol.

TL;DR

Lux Industries, Inc. ("Lux") grants a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable patent license for any implementation of Lux Warp that conforms to the Envelope wire format pinned in SPECIFICATION.md AND is either (a) licensed under BSD-3-Clause-Eco, BSD-3-Clause, Apache-2.0, or a compatible OSI-approved license, OR (b) is a port, validation, or interoperability test of the protocol.

The grant terminates automatically and prospectively against any party that asserts a patent claim against Lux Warp, FIPS 204 ML-DSA, FIPS 205 SLH-DSA, BLS12-381, or any conforming implementation thereof. Defensive termination mirrors Apache-2.0 §3.

The full text of the grant is in §3 Patent Grant below.

§1 Scope of the IP statement

This document covers patent rights and patent posture for:

• The Envelope wire format specified in SPECIFICATION.md.
• The posture-gate composition (pq.ValidateMode over Envelope.HasPQEvidence) pinned in security_profile.go and PQ_PROFILES.md.
• The reference implementation in this repository.
• The KAT vectors in scripts/kat/envelope_kat.json and the oracle that generates them.
• The cross-language reference ports (Rust lux_warp, TypeScript @luxfi/warp) when they conform byte-for-byte to the KAT manifest.

It does NOT cover, and explicitly DISCLAIMS, the following prior art:

Component	Status
FIPS 204 ML-DSA-65	Public domain — NIST standard.
FIPS 205 SLH-DSA	Public domain — NIST standard.
BLS12-381 pairing-friendly curve	Academic / public domain (Bowe / Boneh-Lynn-Shacham).
Module-Lattice (MLWE / MSIS)	Academic / public domain.
Ring-LWE	Academic / public domain.
Avalanche / Subnet Warp Messaging upstream	Apache-2.0 open-source upstream (ava-labs); Lux Warp is a PQ-native fork — no Lux patents asserted against the upstream.
RLP encoding	Public domain (Ethereum specification).
BLS aggregate signature scheme	Academic / public domain (Boneh-Drijvers-Neven).
SHA-256 / SHA3-256 / Keccak	Public domain — NIST standards FIPS 180-4 / FIPS 202.
The general concept of "cross-chain messaging with PQ migration"	Documented in academic literature and prior systems; Lux Warp's specific wire-format and posture-gate composition is the novel contribution.

§2 What Lux considers patentable (high level)

Subject to attorney review, Lux considers the following Lux Warp contributions to be candidates for patent protection:

§2.1 PQ-native envelope with classical-opt-in posture gate

The specific composition of:

• A wire format (Envelope) that carries a classical Beam, an optional Pulse (R-LWE threshold), and an optional MLDSACertSet (FIPS 204 per-validator attestations) over the same digest D;
• A posture gate (pq.ValidateMode) that dispatches three named modes (classical / hybrid / strict-pq) to the appropriate verifier path through a SINGLE function call;
• A signature-scheme registry (signature.Config.LegacyClassicalEnabled) whose default posture refuses classical primitives at install time, decomplected from the chain-level posture gate;
• The single-sentinel error model (pq.ErrClassicalAuthForbidden) used uniformly across every refusal site in the system.

§2.2 Transcript-binding domain separation

The specific construction of the single digest D = keccak256("LUX-WARP-ZAP-CORE-v1" ‖ zap_c14n(Message)) — which folds the full source-chain lineage (NetworkID, SourceChainID, SourceNebulaRoot, SourceKeyEraID, SourceGeneration, HashSuiteID, Payload) into the signed subject — together with the per-lane domain-separation tags that each sign tag ‖ D and so prevent replay across:

• The classical Beam ("LUX-WARP-ZAP-BEAM-v1");
• The Pulsar / Corona Pulse ("LUX-WARP-ZAP-PULSE-v1");
• The ML-DSA cert set ("LUX-WARP-ZAP-MLDSA-v1");

and which are all distinct from the consensus-layer Pulsar prefix ("QUASAR-PULSAR-BUNDLE-v1"). Distinct context strings per domain are required by FIPS 204 §5.2 context-string binding; the SPECIFIC single-digest-plus-per-lane-tag composition here is what Lux considers novel.

§2.3 Canonical-TLV envelope with unambiguous wire framing

The Envelope ZAP wire framing — a 5-byte "LWZP"‖0x01 magic followed by a 0x02 kind byte and a total-order canonical TLV body — that yields a single canonical parser (ParseEnvelope) with no malleability lane: every byte is committed, optional lanes are the empty u32(0) frame rather than omitted fields, and decode rejects any non-canonical or trailing bytes. The framing is unambiguously distinguishable from — and explicitly rejects — legacy RLP bytes (lead 0xc0..0xff) and the legacy 0x02-prefixed envelope, because the ZAP lead byte 'L' (0x4c) is below RLP's 0xc0 list floor.

§3 Patent Grant

Lux Industries, Inc. ("Lux") hereby grants to every person and entity a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable patent license under any Patent Claims of Lux that read on the Lux Warp Protocol (as defined in SPECIFICATION.md of this repository) to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import, and otherwise transfer the Lux Warp Protocol, IF AND ONLY IF the implementation EITHER:

1. Conforms to the Envelope wire format pinned in SPECIFICATION.md AND is licensed under BSD-3-Clause-Eco, BSD-3-Clause, Apache-2.0, MIT, or another OSI-approved license that grants the same rights to its recipients; OR

2. Is part of a port, validation, or interoperability test of the Lux Warp Protocol that is published under an OSI-approved license; OR

3. Is a fork or derivative of this repository that retains the wire format byte-equality with the KAT manifest in scripts/kat/envelope_kat.json.

"Patent Claims of Lux" means any patent claims owned or controlled by Lux that would necessarily be infringed by implementing the Lux Warp Protocol as specified.

Defensive termination. This grant terminates automatically and prospectively against any party that initiates patent litigation (including a cross-claim or counterclaim) against Lux, Lux Warp, FIPS 204 ML-DSA, FIPS 205 SLH-DSA, BLS12-381, or any conforming implementation thereof, alleging infringement by the recipient's use of the Lux Warp Protocol. Defensive termination mirrors Apache-2.0 §3 and extends to all NIST-standardized post-quantum cryptographic primitives.

No grant for non-conforming implementations. A modified wire format that breaks byte-equality with the KAT manifest is NOT a conforming implementation and receives no patent grant under this document. Forks are encouraged; wire-format breaks are NOT licensed under this grant.

§4 Attribution and trademarks

"Lux Warp" and "Lux Network" are trademarks of Lux Industries, Inc. This patent grant does not include a trademark license. Forks and derivatives are encouraged to use distinct names for their wire- incompatible variants.

§5 Contact

Patent questions, royalty-free-grant applicability questions, and attorney-prep claim drafts should be directed to the Lux Industries patent counsel via the repository's MAINTAINERS.md.

---

Document metadata

• Name: PATENTS.md
• Version: v1.0 (Tier A)
• Date: 2026-05-18