DETAILED ACTION
1. Claims 16-29 are pending in this examination.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
2. The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
3. 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.
Allowable Subject Matter
4. Claims 23-24 objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
5.1. 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.
5.2. Claims 16-19, 26-29 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over US Patent Application No. 20170075941 to Finlow-Bates et al (“Finlow-Bates”) in view of “Redactable Blockchain – or – Rewriting History in Bitcoin and Friends” by Ateniese et al (“Ateniese”).
As per claim 16, Finlow-Bates discloses a computer-implemented method comprising: submitting a request to join a membership group ([0048]-[0049], … the only requirement to be a participant on the peer-to-peer network is to establish a connection to one or more of the standard nodes on said network.[0049] Further devices connected via the peer-to-peer network may include one or more network connected devices 106, 107 acting as a validator node, whose role may be to act as a standard node, and may also be to receive miner announcement messages and other transaction messages from the peer-to-peer network, process them according to the methods and processes to be described further below, and transmitting the results of said processing back to the peer-to-peer network for inclusion in a distributed ledger);
receiving a set of parameters for an accumulation tree ([0090], [0030], The validator node 102 may have generated a miner identification number 602, for example beginning with hexadecimal digits 2191, and reported on the distributed ledger in a miner announcement message 622, encapsulated in a ledger block 610. A hash of a data contained within ledger block 610, denoted in FIG. 6 with the label 624, may begin with hexadecimal digits 35B7…he value may be calculated from an input of a plurality of blocks of data extracted from the distributed ledger using: a root of a Merkle tree, a root of a Patricia tree, a root of a radix tree, or a hash output from a set of prior ledger data);
constructing a public key encoding a chosen combination ([0056]-[0058] The miner announcement message may comprise a public key 304 of a public/private key pair generated by the miner to be announced…The
miner announcement message may also comprise a hash 308 of the public key 304 and the unique address identifier 306 in the preceding message content…); and
broadcasting a request for a work ticket with the chosen encoded combination ([0060] The miner announcement message may also comprise a digital signature 312, generated using the private key of the public/private key pair associated with the public key 304 and a hash of a some or all of a preceding data of the miner announcement message, in order to provide for a veracity or an authentication of the miner announcement message. The digital signature algorithm used may be one of ECDSA, DSA, RSA, ElGamal, or some other secure asymmetric key digital signing algorithm).
Finlow-Bates does not explicitly disclose however in the same field of endeavor, Ateniese discloses receiving trapdoor information s and a public key D (section 3.2. pages 115-116, The concept of chameleon hashing was put forward by Krawczyk and Rabin [34], building on the notion of chameleon commitments [17]. Informally, a chameleon hash is a cryptographic hash function that contains a trapdoor: Without the trapdoor, it should be hard to find collisions, but knowledge of the trapdoor…).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teaching of Finlow-Bates with the teaching of Ateniese by including the feature of trapdoor, in order for Finlow-Bates’s system to find collisions efficiently. Informally, a chameleon hash is a cryptographic hash function that contains a trapdoor: Without the trapdoor, it should be hard to find collisions, but knowledge of the trapdoor information allows collisions to be generated efficiently (Ateniese, page 115).
As per claim 17, the combination of Finlow-Bates and Ateniese discloses the computer-implemented method of claim 16, wherein the trapdoor information s and the public key D are generated by a manager node D (Ateniese, section 3.2. pages 115-116). The motivation regarding the obviousness of claim 1 is also applied to claim 2.
As per claim 18, the combination of Finlow-Bates and Ateniese discloses the computer-implemented method of claim 16, wherein cryptographic accumulators are used to provide storage of data in a hash table and used to perform membership authentication (Finlow-Bates, [0030]).
As per claim 19, the combination of Finlow-Bates and Ateniese discloses the computer-implemented method of claim 18, wherein the cryptographic accumulators utilized by one or more worker nodes 1n group membership registration are static bilinear-map accumulators (Finlow-Bates, [0030]-[0031]).
As per claim 26, the combination of Finlow-Bates and Ateniese discloses the computer-implemented method of claim 16, wherein the request for the work ticket includes an input transferring control of digital assets specified by a worker node as a parameter, and a transaction output that includes R i and Ti (Finlow-Bates, [0057]).
As per claim 27, the combination of Finlow-Bates and Ateniese discloses the computer-implemented method of claim 26, wherein the worker node submits multiple worker tickets generated using different combinations (Finlow-Bates, [0057]).
Claim 28, is rejected for similar reasons as stated above.
Claim 29, is rejected for similar reasons as stated above.
5.3. Claims 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Finlow-Bates and Ateniese as applied to claim above, and in view of EP Patent Application No. EP 2157725 A1 to Hatano et al (“Hatano”).
As per claim 20, the combination of Finlow-Bates and Ateniese discloses the invention as described above. Finlow-Bates and Ateniese do not explicitly disclose however, In the same field of endeavor, Hatano discloses the computer-implemented method of claim 18, wherein G,, Gz are cyclic multiplicative groups of prime order p with generators g;,g 2 and an isomorphism b: Gz > G, such that O(g2) = gy ([0139]).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teaching of Finlow-Bates with the teaching of Ateniese/ Hatano by including the feature of prime order, in order for Finlow-Bates’s system to prohibited from browsing and editing the content's by the unauthorized user. The partial contents are encrypted using the browsing-control-use secret key. Similarly to the editing-control-use secret key, based on the access-control information, the browsing-control-use secret key is also encrypted, using the public key to which the browsing authorization for each partial content is given. Unless a user possesses the knowledge of the browsing-control-use secret key, it is difficult for the user to decrypt the partial contents encrypted (i.e., encrypted partial contents). As a result, when the key-encrypted data in the encrypted content is decrypted using a private key to which the browsing authorization is given, the browsing-control-use secret key for each partial content is contained in the decryption result. In other cases, the browsing-control-use secret key is not contained therein. The above-described processing makes it possible to control whether each of the partial contents is browsing-permitted or not (Hatano).
5.4. Claims 21 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Finlow-Bates and Ateniese as applied to claim above, and in view of US Patent No. 9152716 issued to Triandopoulos et al (“Triandopoulos”).
As per claim 21, the combination of Finlow-Bates and Ateniese discloses the invention as described above. Finlow-Bates and Ateniese do not explicitly disclose however, In the same field of endeavor, Triandopoulos discloses the computer-implemented method of claim 16, wherein the set of parameters comprises: a set of N elements {e,,..., ev}; group generator g; a number c of elements where 1 < c < N; and N, the number of elements in the set (4:15-40).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teaching of Finlow-Bates with the teaching of Triandopoulos/ Ateniese by including the feature of generator, in order for Finlow-Bates’s system to provide a search engine technique that allows a user to ensure that an untrusted search engine provides complete and correct search results without requiring large proofs for large data collections. Thus techniques are presented for a trusted crawler to index a distributed collection of documents and create an authenticated search structure that allows an untrusted search server to return reliably complete and correct search results (Triandopoulos).
5.4. Claims 22 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Finlow-Bates and Ateniese as applied to claim above, and in view of US Patent Application No. 20110225429 to Papamanthou et al (“Papamanthou”).
As per claim 22, the combination of Finlow-Bates and Ateniese discloses the invention as described above. Further Finlow-Bates disclose the computer-implemented method of claim 16, wherein constructing the public key comprises choosing a combination of c elements among N elements given in a set of elements, building a local digest representing the c elements chosen Finlow-Bates, [0056]-[0058], also see [0060}-[0061]. Finlow-Bates and Ateniese do not explicitly disclose however, In the same field of endeavor, Papamanthou discloses obtaining a point Y on an Elliptic Curve calculated based at least in part on local and global digests ([0339]-[0340], [0351]).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teaching of Finlow-Bates with the teaching of Papamanthou/Ateniese by including the feature of Elliptic Curve, in order for Finlow-Bates’s system to to detect both data corruption caused by a faulty server (e.g., because of hardware issues or software errors) and data tampering performed by an attacker that compromises the server (e.g., deliberate deletion or modification of files). In one exemplary embodiment, an apparatus includes a memory storing data and a processor performing operations. The apparatus generates or maintains an accumulation tree for the stored data--an ordered tree structure with a root node, leaf nodes and internal nodes. Each leaf node corresponds to a portion of the data. A depth of the tree remains constant. A bound on a degree of each internal node is a function of a number of leaf nodes of a subtree rooted at the internal node. Each node of the tree has an accumulation value. Accumulation values of the root and internal nodes are determined by hierarchically employing an accumulator over the accumulation values of the nodes lying one level below the node in question. The accumulation value of the root node is a digest for the tree (Papamanthou, abstract).
5.4. Claims 25 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Finlow-Bates and Ateniese as applied to claim above, and in view of US Patent No. 20130236019 issued to Zaverucha et al (“Zaverucha”).
As per claim 25, the combination of Finlow-Bates and Ateniese discloses the invention as described above. Finlow-Bates and Ateniese do not explicitly disclose however, In the same field of endeavor, Zaverucha discloses the computer-implemented method of claim 16, further comprising generating a second public key T; = y; X G where G is a generator of an Elliptic Curve (g = G) and two private keys, k; and y; verify a relation: k; = y; mod z where Z isa large number chosen by a manager node and made publicly available ([0022]).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teaching of Finlow-Bates with the teaching of Zaverucha/ Ateniese by including the feature of private keys, in order for Finlow-Bates’s system to grant a third party access to the private key and the associated seed to in response to a request from a third party authorized to access the communication session. A method for providing a session key to a third party includes identifying a private key associated with a public key certificate in response to an event. A session key for a communication session is based, at least in part, on the private key, an associated seed for a random number generator, and public keys assigned to user equipment participating in the communication session. The private key associated with the public key certificate is automatically transmitted to an interception authority. The interception authorities are configured to grant a third party access to the private key and the associated seed to in response to a request from a third party authorized to access the communication session (Zaverucha, abstract).
6.1. The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure as the prior art discloses many of the claim features (See PTO-form 892).
6.2. a). US Patent Application No. 20160379212 to Bowman et al., discloses in one embodiment, an apparatus includes a calculation logic to receive a plurality of wait certificates, each associated with a validated block of transactions of a distributed ledger system, and to generate a local mean value based thereon; a timer generation logic to generate a wait time for a proof of wait associated with a first block of transactions of the distributed ledger system based at least in part on the local mean value; a timer logic to identify when the wait period has expired; and a certificate generation logic to generate a wait certificate for the first block of transactions responsive to expiration of the wait period, the wait certificate to validate the first block of transactions. Other embodiments are described and claimed.
b). US Patent Application No. 20120324233 to Nguyen et al., discloses the subject disclosure is directed towards processing requests for accessing a service provider. After examining at least one security token, a public key and a portion of attribute information are identified. An authentication component is accessed and applied to the public key. A unique user identifier is employed in generating the public key. The authentication component is generated using information from at least one revoked security token or at least one valid security token. The authentication component is configured to prove validity of the at least one security token.
Conclusion
7. Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to HARUNUR RASHID whose telephone number is (571)270-7195. The examiner can normally be reached 9 AM to 5PM.
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HARUNUR . RASHID
Primary Examiner
Art Unit 2497
/HARUNUR RASHID/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2497