DETAILED ACTION
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 .
Specification
The abstract of the disclosure is objected to because the abstract contains phrases that should be avoided such as “are described”. A corrected abstract of the disclosure is required and must be presented on a separate sheet, apart from any other text. See MPEP § 608.01(b).
Applicant is reminded of the proper language and format for an abstract of the disclosure.
The abstract should be in narrative form and generally limited to a single paragraph on a separate sheet within the range of 50 to 150 words in length. The abstract should describe the disclosure sufficiently to assist readers in deciding whether there is a need for consulting the full patent text for details.
The language should be clear and concise and should not repeat information given in the title. It should avoid using phrases which can be implied, such as, “The disclosure concerns,” “The disclosure defined by this invention,” “The disclosure describes,” etc. In addition, the form and legal phraseology often used in patent claims, such as “means” and “said,” should be avoided.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claims 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
Re. claims 1, 8 and 15; the claims recite “hash control circuitry to, for a request to perform a stateless hash-based signature operation on an input, cause performance of a one-time signature scheme function and a forest of random subsets function by the one or more hash engine circuits to generate a resultant”. It is unclear what entity, either the hash control circuitry or hash engine circuit, performs the one-time signature scheme function and forest of random subsets function.
Claims 2-7, 9-14 and 16-20 fall together accordingly as they do not cure the deficiencies of the independent claims.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
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.
Claims 1-5, 7-12, and 14-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Seo (KR 20240175766) in view of Banerjee et al. (“Accelerating Post-Quantum Cryptography using an Energy-Efficient TLS Crypto-Processor”).
Re. claim 1, Seo discloses an apparatus comprising (Seo discloses a MacBook [0176]): for a request to perform a stateless hash-based signature operation on an input, cause performance of a one-time signature scheme function and a forest of random subsets function by the one or more hash engine circuits to generate a resultant (Seo discloses the hash-based cryptographic module can be applied to the cryptographic operator of a secure hash-based signature algorithm [0025]. SPHINCS+ uses functions with cryptographic properties, and each parameter is defined as follows: 'h' and 'd' are the parameters of Hyper-Tree, 'b' and 'k' are the parameters of FORS, and 'w' is the parameter of Winternitz [0044]. Input message received [0057][0174]).
Seo does not explicitly teach but Banerjee teaches one or more hash engine circuits; a coupling to allow for communication between the one or more hash engine circuits and a memory; and hash control circuitry to (Banerjee teaches the cryptographic accelerator consists of dedicated hardware for AES-128/256, SHA2-256 and 256-bit prime-field ECC, along with 2 KB memory, control logic and a TLS state machine. These cycle counts include data movement between the accelerator memory and the cryptographic cores. [A. system overview, Page 1] Fig. 1).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one or ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the apparatus method and system disclosed by Seo to include one or more hash engine circuits; a coupling to allow for communication between the one or more hash engine circuits and a memory; and hash control circuitry to as disclosed by Banerjee. One of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated for the purpose of improving speed and energy efficiency (Banerjee [Abstract]).
Re. claim 2, Seo-Banerjee teach the apparatus of claim 1, wherein the stateless hash-based signature operation is a key generation operation, and the hash control circuitry is to cause the one or more hash engine circuits to generate the resultant of a public key for the input of a private key (Seo discloses a final XMSS public key [0160][0038]).
Re. claim 3, Seo-Banerjee teach the apparatus of claim 1, wherein the stateless hash-based signature operation is a signature generation operation, and the hash control circuitry is to cause the one or more hash engine circuits to generate the resultant of a signature for the input of a private key (Seo [0008][0017][0038][0041]).
Re. claim 4, Seo-Banerjee teach the apparatus of claim 1, wherein the stateless hash-based signature operation is a verification operation, and the hash control circuitry is to cause the one or more hash engine circuits to generate the resultant of a public key for the input of a signature (Seo [0005][0008][0017][0038][0041]).
Re. claim 5, Seo-Banerjee teach the apparatus of claim 1, wherein the input comprises a hash output length, a number of forest of random subsets trees, and a number of Winternitz chains (Seo discloses SPHINCS+ uses functions with cryptographic properties, and each parameter is defined as follows: 'h' and 'd' are the parameters of Hyper-Tree, 'b' and 'k' are the parameters of FORS, and 'w' is the parameter of Winternitz [0044]).
Re. claim 7, Seo-Banerjee teach the apparatus of claim 1, wherein the stateless hash-based signature operation is according to a SPHIiNCS+ standard (Seo discloses SPHINCS+ [0174]).
Re. claim 8, claim 8 is rejected with the same rationale as applied in claim 1 above.
Re. claim 9, rejection of claim 8 is included and claim 9 is rejected with the same rationale as applied in claim 2 above.
Re. claim 10, rejection of claim 8 is included and claim 10 is rejected with the same rationale as applied in claim 3 above.
Re. claim 11, rejection of claim 8 is included and claim 11 is rejected with the same rationale as applied in claim 4 above.
Re. claim 12, rejection of claim 8 is included and claim 12 is rejected with the same rationale as applied in claim 5 above.
Re. claim 14, rejection of claim 8 is included and claim 14 is rejected with the same rationale as applied in claim 7 above.
Re. claim 15, claim 15 is rejected with the same rationale as applied in claims 1 and 8 above.
Re. claim 16, rejection of claim 15 is included and claim 16 is rejected with the same rationale as applied in claim 2 above.
Re. claim 17, rejection of claim 15 is included and claim 17 is rejected with the same rationale as applied in claim 3 above.
Re. claim 18, rejection of claim 15 is included and claim 18 is rejected with the same rationale as applied in claim 4 above.
Re. claim 19, rejection of claim 15 is included and claim 19 is rejected with the same rationale as applied in claim 5 above.
Re. claim 20, rejection of claim 15 is included and claim 20 is rejected with the same rationale as applied in claim 7 above.
Claims 6 and 13 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Seo (KR 20240175766) in view of Banerjee et al. (“Accelerating Post-Quantum Cryptography using an Energy-Efficient TLS Crypto-Processor”, hereinafter Banerjee) and in further view of Bernstein et al. (“SPHINCS: practical stateless hash-based signatures”, hereinafter Bernstein).
Re. claim 6, Seo-Banerjee teach the apparatus of claim 1, Seo-Banerjee do not explicitly teach but Bernstein teaches wherein the input comprises a precomputed intermediate state of a hashing standard public key seed (Bernstein teaches the OTS public key of the root becomes the overall public key. The secret key is a seed value that is used to pseudorandomly generate all the OTS key pairs of the tree [Page 4]. Generate a HORST seed [Page 14]).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one or ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the apparatus method and system disclosed by Seo-Banerjee to include wherein the input comprises a precomputed intermediate state of a hashing standard public key seed as disclosed by Banerjee. One of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated for the purpose of increasing the security level (Bernstein [Page 4]).
Re. claim 13, rejection of claim 8 is included and claim 13 is rejected with the same rationale as applied in claim 6 above.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. Soeda (US 20230289759) discloses digital signature P2 is generated by signing a hash value of transaction body P1 using a signature key of the generator of the transaction data, i.e. by encrypting the hash value using a private key of the generator. As means for digital signatures, the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA), CRYSTALS-Dilithium, FALCON, SPHINCS+, and the like may be used.
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/KEVIN AYALA/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2496
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