DETAILED ACTION
This Non Final Office Action is in response to Application filed on 06/28/2023.
Claims 1-20 filed on 06/28/2023 are being considered on the merits.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Drawings
The drawings filed on 06/28/2023 are accepted.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statements (IDS) submitted on 12/19/2023 and 07/08/2025 have been considered. The submission is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly an initialed and dated copy of Applicant's IDS form 1449 filed 12/19/2023 and 07/08/2025 are attached to the instant Office action.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
The factual inquiries set forth in Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 148 USPQ 459 (1966), that are applied for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
Claims 1, 6-10, 15-16, 18-19 and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Shim (US 20170220394 A1) in view of Egner (US 20190026450 A1).
Regarding claim 1, Shim (US 20170220394 A1) teaches a non-transitory machine readable storage medium comprising instructions to cause programmable circuitry (Shim Abstract “…a cloud control server that controls a plurality of cloud servers, the cloud control server including a communication unit configured to transmit, to a mobile device, information about one or more cloud servers from among the plurality of cloud servers…”) to at least:
cause transmission of [[anonymized]] information corresponding to a user device to a network device (Shim [0041] “…a cloud control server (i.e. network device) that controls a plurality of cloud servers includes a communication unit configured to obtain movement route information of a user of a mobile device (i.e. user device) and location information of the mobile device; and a controller configured to determine an estimated route along which the mobile device is to be moved, based on the location information and the movement route information of the user of the mobile device, to determine a cloud server to which a virtual machine of the mobile device is to be migrated, based on the estimated route along which the mobile device is to be moved, and to migrate the virtual machine of the mobile device to the determined cloud server from a cloud server in which the virtual machine of the mobile device was being executed and that is from among the plurality of cloud servers, wherein the virtual machine of the mobile device executes an application that is output from the mobile device.”); and
cause migration of a virtual execution environment from a first compute device to a second compute device based on a response from the network device (Shim [0041] “…a cloud control server (i.e. network device) that controls a plurality of cloud servers includes a communication unit configured to obtain movement route information of a user of a mobile device (i.e. user device) and location information of the mobile device; and a controller configured to determine an estimated route along which the mobile device is to be moved, based on the location information and the movement route information of the user of the mobile device, to determine a cloud server (i.e. second compute device) to which a virtual machine of the mobile device is to be migrated, based on the estimated route along which the mobile device is to be moved, and to migrate the virtual machine of the mobile device to the determined cloud server (i.e. second compute device) from a cloud server (i.e. first compute device) in which the virtual machine of the mobile device was being executed and that is from among the plurality of cloud servers, wherein the virtual machine of the mobile device executes an application that is output from the mobile device.”), the virtual execution environment to execute at least a portion of a workload for the user device (Shim [0041] “…wherein the virtual machine of the mobile device executes an application that is output from the mobile device”).
Shim does not disclose that the information corresponding to a user device is anonymized. Emphasis in italic below.
Egner discloses anonymized information corresponding to a user device… (Egner [0094, 0098, 0102, 0109] and Figure 8 discloses accessing encrypted/anonymized information pertaining to the location of the subscriber, which will be decrypted and used to determine the optimal local authenticate partner for the client from a list of candidate local mobile edge authenticate systems.).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Shim to incorporate the teaching of Egner to utilize the above feature, with the motivation of securing subscribers’ locations as they traverse different regions.
Regarding claim 10, claim 10 recites similar limitation to claim 1, therefore rejected with the same rationale/motivation applied to claim 1.
Regarding claim 20, claim 20 recites similar limitation to claim 1, therefore rejected with the same rationale/motivation applied to claim 1.
Regarding claim 6, Shim in view of Egner teaches the machine readable storage medium of claim 1, wherein the instructions cause the programmable circuitry to determine the second compute device based on the response from the network device (Shim [0041] “…a controller configured to determine an estimated route along which the mobile device is to be moved, based on the location information and the movement route information of the user of the mobile device, to determine a cloud server to which a virtual machine of the mobile device is to be migrated,”).
Regarding claim 15, claim 15 recites similar limitation to claim 6, therefore rejected with the same rationale/motivation applied to claim 6.
Regarding claim 7, Shim in view of Egner teaches the machine readable storage medium of claim 1, wherein the instructions cause the programmable circuitry to track a location of the user device (Shim [0041] “…a controller configured to determine an estimated route along which the mobile device is to be moved, based on the location information and the movement route information of the user of the mobile device, to determine a cloud server to which a virtual machine of the mobile device is to be migrated,”, [056-0259] further discloses following the movement and location of the user mobile device to determine the second/appropriate cloud server).
Regarding claim 16, claim 16 recites similar limitation to claim 7, therefore rejected with the same rationale/motivation applied to claim 7.
Regarding claim 8, Shim in view of Egner teaches the machine readable storage medium of claim 1, wherein the instructions cause the programmable circuitry to:
Shim does not disclose the below limitation.
Egner discloses obfuscate user traffic information corresponding to the user device; and cause transmission of the obfuscated user traffic information to the network device (Egner [0017] “The security system may operate across several devices, including the subscribing client's information handling systems, one or more mobile-edge computing system (MEC) devices, one or more mobile edge authenticating system (MEA) devices, and a remotely located authentication server.”, [0021- 0023, 0100] discloses encrypted communication among the different devices).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Shim to incorporate the teaching of Egner to utilize the above feature, with the motivation of securing subscribers’ locations as they traverse different regions.
Regarding claim 18, claim 18 recites similar limitation to claim 8, therefore rejected with the same rationale/motivation applied to claim 8.
Regarding claim 9, Shim in view of Egner teaches the machine readable storage medium of claim 1, wherein the instructions cause the programmable circuitry to:
Shim does not disclose the below limitation.
Egner discloses decrypt the response from the network device to identify candidate edge computing devices (Egner Figure 8 814 [0098] “At block 814, in an embodiment, the security credential provisioning system may collect neighborhood local edge authenticate availability advertisement messages and/or trust access information from mobile edge-compute systems…”, [0101] “Through the edge compute advertising service, advertisement messages may be collected at 814 from available MEC systems within a preset tolerance range of the position of the client information handling system…”); and determine the second computing device based on at least one of a capability of the second computing device, a capacity of the second computing device, or a location of the second computing device (Egner Figure 8 816 [0102] “At block 816, in an embodiment, the security credential provisioning system may determine an optimal local authenticate partner for the client from a list of candidate local mobile edge authenticate systems.”).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Shim to incorporate the teaching of Egner to utilize the above feature, with the motivation of securing subscribers’ locations as they traverse different regions.
Regarding claim 19, claim 19 recites similar limitation to claim 9, therefore rejected with the same rationale/motivation applied to claim 9.
Claims 2-3 and 11-12 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Shim (US 20170220394 A1) in view of Egner (US 20190026450 A1) and Padhye (US 20120324228 A1).
Regarding claim 2, Shim in view of Egner teaches the machine readable storage medium of claim 1.
Shim in view of Egner does not disclose the below limitation.
Padhye discloses wherein the instructions cause the programmable circuitry to generate an evaluation key, the evaluation key to facilitate processing of the anonymized information without decrypting the anonymized information (Padhye Figure 5 [0008] discloses two computing devices sharing e.g. secure random number generator, etc., where “…a combination of encryption and quantization can be utilized to facilitate responding to location-based queries without decrypting encrypted location constraints or uploaded encrypted locations…Both mobile computing devices, however, have identical mappings between quantized locations and random numbers generated by the shared random number generator. Thus, the server can respond to certain location-based queries without having knowledge of the actual geographic location of either the first mobile computing device or the second mobile computing device.”, where evaluation key, random generator, facilitate processing of the geographic location without using decryption).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Shim in view of Egner to incorporate the teaching of Padhye to utilize the above feature, with the motivation of preserving privacy by responding to certain location-based queries without having knowledge of the actual geographic location, as recognized by (Padhye Abstract [0008]).
Regarding claim 11, claim 11 recites similar limitation to claim 2, therefore rejected with the same rationale/motivation applied to claim 2.
Regarding claim 3, Shim in view of Egner and Padhye teaches the machine readable storage medium of claim 2.
Shim in view of Egner does not disclose the below limitation.
Padhye discloses wherein the evaluation key is to facilitate the processing of the anonymized information without the network device determining at least one of a location of the user device or an identity of the user device (Padhye Figure 5 [0008] discloses two computing devices sharing e.g. secure random number generator, etc., where “…a combination of encryption and quantization can be utilized to facilitate responding to location-based queries without decrypting encrypted location constraints or uploaded encrypted locations…Both mobile computing devices, however, have identical mappings between quantized locations and random numbers generated by the shared random number generator. Thus, the server can respond to certain location-based queries without having knowledge of the actual geographic location of either the first mobile computing device or the second mobile computing device.”, where evaluation key, random generator, facilitate processing of the geographic location without using decryption).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Shim in view of Egner to incorporate the teaching of Padhye to utilize the above feature, with the motivation of preserving privacy by responding to certain location-based queries without having knowledge of the actual geographic location, as recognized by (Padhye Abstract [0008]).
Regarding claim 12, claim 12 recites similar limitation to claim 3, therefore rejected with the same rationale/motivation applied to claim 3.
Claims 4 and 13 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Shim (US 20170220394 A1) in view of Egner (US 20190026450 A1) and Jannat et. al. “An Oblivious Transfer Protocol Based on Elgamal Encryption for Preserving Location Privacy”, Wireless Pers Commun (2017) 97:3113–3123 DOI 10.1007/s11277-017-4664.
Regarding claim 4, Shim in view of Egner teaches the machine readable storage medium of claim 1.
Shim in view of Egner does not disclose oblivious encryption.
Jannat discloses wherein the instructions cause the programmable circuitry to encrypt location information corresponding to the user device using an oblivious encryption technique, the encrypted location information included in the anonymized information (Jannat Page 3114 line 4-8, 4-48 “revealing the exact location of a client allows an adversary to track and predict the client’s identity and daily movements which in turn may result in physical stalking, economic gain [5], etc. Therefore, approaches for preserving clients’ past and future location privacy are needed to be employed in location based services [6, 7]… a 1-out-L oblivious transfer protocol based on Elgamal encryption. A 1-out-L oblivious transfer is executed by a sender and a receiver. Each receiver obtains only one piece of information from the L pieces received blindly from the sender such that the sender cannot detect which piece of information is obtained by the receiver [17]. 1-out-of-L oblivious transfer is a stronger version of PIR that imposes an additional privacy property for the sender such that the receiver learns at most one of the sender’s L transmitted items.”).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Shim in view of Egner to incorporate the teaching of Jannat to utilize the above feature, with the motivation of preserving the client’s location privacy and also for protecting an LBS server’s database security., as recognized by (Jannat Abstract).
Regarding claim 13, claim 13 recites similar limitation to claim 4, therefore rejected with the same rationale/motivation applied to claim 4.
Claims 5 and 14 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Shim (US 20170220394 A1) in view of Egner (US 20190026450 A1), Jannat et. al. “An Oblivious Transfer Protocol Based on Elgamal Encryption for Preserving Location Privacy”, Wireless Pers Commun (2017) 97:3113–3123 DOI 10.1007/s11277-017-4664, and Olumofin (US 20170053282 A1).
Regarding claim 5, Shim in view of Egner and Jannat teaches the machine readable storage medium of claim 4, wherein the instructions cause the programmable circuitry to.
Shim does not disclose the below limitation.
Egner discloses encrypt the location information and a threshold amount (Egner [0066] and Figure 3 illustrates the preset tolerance range beyond which, a new candidate and optimal mobile edge computing system is selected according to the steps of Figure 8 816, where the location is encrypted and subsequently decrypted as illustrated in 810, motivation in claim applies).
Shim in view of Egner does not explicitly disclose the below limitation.
Olumofin discloses encrypt the location information after a location of the user device has changed by more than a threshold amount (Olumofin [0017] “…service provider id encrypts each location in its location data set (the current location of each mobile device 14 on its network) using the public key. Whenever a mobile subscriber changes location, an encryption of the new location is used to update the data set.”, where the change in location is associated with a threshold to trigger the system to encrypt the new location).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Shim in view of Egner to incorporate the teaching of Olumofin to utilize the above feature, with the motivation of ensuring privacy protection of the mobile device, as recognized by (Olumofin [0001]).
Regarding claim 14, claim 14 recites similar limitation to claim 5, therefore rejected with the same rationale/motivation applied to claim 5.
Claim 17 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Shim (US 20170220394 A1) in view of Egner (US 20190026450 A1) and Olumofin (US 20170053282 A1).
Regarding claim 17, Shim in view of Egner teaches the apparatus of claim 10.
Shim in view of Egner does not explicitly disclose the below limitation.
Olumofin discloses wherein the programmable circuitry is to encrypt identification information corresponding to the user device, the encrypted identification information included in the anonymized information (Olumofin [0017] “…service provider id encrypts each location in its location data set (the current location of each mobile device 14 on its network) using the public key. Whenever a mobile subscriber changes location, an encryption of the new location is used to update the data set.”, where the encryption of a location of each device 14 requires identificatory information of the location associated with each device 14).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Shim in view of Egner to incorporate the teaching of Olumofin to utilize the above feature, with the motivation of ensuring privacy protection of the mobile device, as recognized by (Olumofin [0001]).
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure:
Liu (US 11915154 B2) discloses application migrations in some to follow the locations of mobile users.
ARUNKUMAR (US 20150350891 A1) discloses techniques for location information control using user profiles and location obfuscation.
Wei (US 20120005476 A1) discloses software may seamlessly migrate from one access method to another based on the user's location,
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to BASSAM A NOAMAN whose telephone number is (571)272-2705. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 8:30 AM-5:00PM.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Eleni A. Shiferaw can be reached at (571) 272-3867. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/BASSAM A NOAMAN/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2497
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