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 .
DETAILED ACTION
The instant application having Application No. 18/866,252 is presented for examination by the examiner. Claims 1-12 are pending. Claims 1-11 have been amended.
Response to Amendment
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
Rejections under this statute have been overcome by amendment.
Response to Arguments
Applicant's arguments filed 7/6/26 have been fully considered but they are not persuasive. On page 8, Applicant alleges that Doctor does not appear to describe such an indicator of exploitability. Examiner respectfully disagrees. Paragraph 0036 describes receiving back the scan results of a vulnerability scan. Those results of the scan are processed by the SAM and if a severe vulnerability is discovered an alert is generated (previous paragraph 0035]. So, the results from the vulnerability scan are interpreted as the claim’s signal comprising an indicator of the exploitability. It is readily apparent that vulnerabilities make the system vulnerable because they are exploitable. The claim does not require more than what is taught by the reference. In view of the foregoing, respectfully the rejection must be maintained.
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 of this title, 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.
Claim 11 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over USP Application Publication 2015/0150072 to Doctor et al., hereinafter Doctor in view of NPL entitled “Towards Improving Container Security by Preventing Runtime Escapes” published Oct. 18, 2021 and cited on IDS filed 11/15/24, hereinafter Reeves.
As per claim 11, Doctor teaches a security management device comprising:
at least one processor (Fig. 5); and
at least one non-transitory computer readable medium comprising instructions stored thereon which when executed by the at least one processor configure the security management device to identify exploitability of a computer vulnerability in at least one computer (Fig. 4 and 0035),
said identifying including:
receiving from said at last one computer (0035) a signal comprising an indicator of the exploitability of said vulnerability in a set of processes of said at least one computer (0036);
and adding said signal to a list [SAM adds vulnerabilities to listed in database; 0031, 0037].
Doctor is silent in explicitly teaching the exploitability of said vulnerability in a set of processes is associated with a namespace combination. Reeves teaches the exploitability of said vulnerability in a set of processes is associated with a namespace combination (Table II, Fig. 2, section V, paragraph A and section II, paragraph A). Reeves tests various exploits on combinations of namespaces for processes inside of the container associated with the namespaces. Reeves teaches another type of vulnerability testing. Doctor teaches scans for many types of vulnerabilities on the devices. One could have obvious substituted this type of vulnerability test or combined it with the other types of tests that Doctor scans for. Either way, performing a scan for vulnerabilities and sending the result of the scan to a list is not predicated on which type of scan or test is being conducted. Substituting one type of scan for another would yield predictable results. Doctor already teaches conforming the tests to specific types of operating systems (0022). The claim is obvious because one of can substitute methods known before the effective filing date which produce predictable results.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-10 and 12 are allowable over the prior art. The closest prior art is the aforementioned Reeves NPL. While it does teach the exploitability of said vulnerability in a set of processes is associated with a namespace combination (Table II, Fig. 2, section V, paragraph A and section II, paragraph A) and various exploits on combinations of namespaces for processes inside of the container associated with the namespaces, Reeves does not explicitly teach the “detecting including, for a reference process of said set: initializing, from the reference process, and executing a test process associated with said combination” in combination with all of the other claim requirements.
Conclusion
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any extension fee pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to MICHAEL R. VAUGHAN whose telephone number is (571)270-7316. The examiner can normally be reached on Monday - Thursday, 7:30am - 5:00pm, EST. If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Lynn Feild can be reached on (571) 272-2092. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/MICHAEL R VAUGHAN/
Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2431
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