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 .
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 (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) 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 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.
This application currently names joint inventors. In considering patentability of the claims the examiner presumes that the subject matter of the various claims was commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the claimed invention(s) absent any evidence to the contrary. Applicant is advised of the obligation under 37 CFR 1.56 to point out the inventor and effective filing dates of each claim that was not commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the later invention in order for the examiner to consider the applicability of 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(C) for any potential 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) prior art against the later invention.
Claims 1-2, 4-6, 7, 11-12, and 14-16 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Kim Hyung-joong (KR-101568211-B1), hereinafter “Kim” in view of Schulz et al. “"Shadow Wi-Fi: Teaching Smartphones to Transmit Raw Signals and to Extract Channel State Information to Implement Practical Covert Channels over Wi-Fi", MobiSys ’18, June 10–15, 2018, Munich, Germany” (year 2018)., hereinafter “Schulz”.
Claims 1, 7, and 11:
Regarding claim 1, Kim teaches, an apparatus for transmitting information (Kim: Clm.1 “document compression unit” and “information hiding processing unit”) using a wireless covert channel, comprising:
memory in which at least one program is recorded; and a processor for executing the program (existence of memory and processor is implied), wherein:
the program generates a packet from each of data blocks having a predetermined size acquired by dividing data (Kim: Clm.1, “dividing the bitstream of the compressed document file into a plurality of bit blocks each having a preset first length,”); the packet is configured with a header and a payload (Kim: [0028], “the bitstream of a compressed document file consists of a header and a payload”), and the header includes a Start Frame Delimiter (SFD) field indicating a start point of the packet, and a payload bit inversion field indicating whether a value of the payload is inverted in units of bits (Kim: [0034] “if the value of the hidden information bit is a single-digit bit '0', the bit of the bit block (Xk) is maintained as is Outputs. On the other hand, if the value of the hidden information bit is a single-digit bit '1', the bits of the bit block (Xk) are 1-bit units. It is inverted and output. For reference, the value of the hidden information bit that preserves or inverts the bit value of the bit block is. It can be mutually changed.”).
Kim however fails to expressly teach covert channel, as per the claim.
Schulz in the same field of endeavor teaches covert channel in wi-fi, as disclosed in [Abstract], “we build a covert channel on top of Wi-Fi to stealthily exchange information between two devices by prefiltering Wi-Fi frames prior to transmission”.
It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine disclosure by Schulz with that of Kim to come up with the claimed invention, transmits the packet through a covert channel, motivated by stealthy transmission, as disclosed by Schulz in [introduction], “implement a new physical layer-based covert channel. By means of this covert channel, it is possible to stealthily embed additional information into Wi-Fi frames.”.
Though combination of Kim and Schulz do not teach, a payload attribute field indicating whether the payload is data or a Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC), the would have been obvious implementation based on widely used method of use of data packets and Cyclic Redundancy Check for integrity of data packet.
Claim 7 is for an apparatus implementing method complimentary to method performed by apparatus of claim 1. Claim is rejected based on rejection of claim 1.
Claim 11 is a change in category with respect to claim 1. Claim is rejected based on rejection of claim 1.
Claims 2 and 12:
Regarding claim 2, combination of Kim and Schulz teaches the apparatus of claim 1 discussed above).
Though combination of Kim and Schulz fails to teach, wherein the SFD field is one bit in length and is set to ‘1’, It would have been implementation dependent how many bits to use for start frame delimiter..
Claim element of claim 12 are discussed above in claim 2.
Claims 4 and 14:
Regarding claim 4, combination of Kim and Schulz teaches the apparatus of claim 1 discussed above).
Though combination of Kim and Schulz does not expressly teach, when the payload is one byte in length, the payload attribute field is one bit in length, and the payload attribute field is set to ‘0’ when the payload is data, but is set to ‘1’ when the payload is a CRC, the claim would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art based on the nature of the payload being data or CRC. With only two options, 1 bit would be sufficient.
Claim elements of claim 14 are discussed above in claim 4.
Claims 5 and 15:
Regarding claim 5, combination of Kim and Schulz teaches the apparatus of claim 4 discussed above), wherein:
when the payload is data, lower seven bits of the payload are set to an ASCII code corresponding to a character (implied by disclosure in Kim: Clm.9, “Using a preset dictionary as the information analysis standard, meaningful words included in the dictionary are extracted from among words consisting
of multiple characters included in the bit block”; original ASCII characters are 7 bits in length. ), whereas when the payload is a CRC, eight bits of the payload is set to the CRC (obvious implementation).
Claim elements of claim 15 are discussed above in claim 5.
Claims 6 and 16:
Regarding claim 6, combination of Kim and Schulz teaches the apparatus of claim 4 discussed above).
The claim, when the payload is three bytes in length, the payload attribute field is two bits in length, and the payload attribute field is set to ‘00’ when the payload is one-byte data, is set to ‘01’ when the payload is two-byte data, is set to ‘10’ when the payload is three-byte data, and is set to ‘11’ when the payload is a CRC, is obvious because of only four choices are there, payload being one bite, two bytes, three bytes or CRC..
Claim elements of claim 16 are discussed above in claim 6.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 3, 8-10, 13, and 17-20 are 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.
Conclusion
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/INTEKHAAB A SIDDIQUEE/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2462
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