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 .
This is a non-final office action in response to applicant’s preliminary amendment filed on 12/12/2024.
Claims 1-23 are cancelled. Claims 24-41 are pending and being considered.
Priority
The instant application is a 371 of PCT/EP2022/067133 filed on 06/23/2022.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 12/12/2024, has been considered. The submission is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, initialed and dated copy of Applicant’s IDS form 1449 filed as stated above is attached to the instant Office Action.
Specification
The disclosure is objected to because of the following informalities:
Abstract. The Abstract should not include reference numerals.
Applicant is reminded of the proper content of an abstract of the disclosure.
A patent abstract is a concise statement of the technical disclosure of the patent and should include that which is new in the art to which the invention pertains. The abstract should not refer to purported merits or speculative applications of the invention and should not compare the invention with the prior art.
If the patent is of a basic nature, the entire technical disclosure may be new in the art, and the abstract should be directed to the entire disclosure. If the patent is in the nature of an improvement in an old apparatus, process, product, or composition, the abstract should include the technical disclosure of the improvement. The abstract should also mention by way of example any preferred modifications or alternatives.
Where applicable, the abstract should include the following: (1) if a machine or apparatus, its organization and operation; (2) if an article, its method of making; (3) if a chemical compound, its identity and use; (4) if a mixture, its ingredients; (5) if a process, the steps.
Extensive mechanical and design details of an apparatus should not be included in the abstract. The abstract should be in narrative form and generally limited to a single paragraph within the range of 50 to 150 words in length.
See MPEP § 608.01(b) for guidelines for the preparation of patent abstracts.
Appropriate correction is required.
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 26-29, 34, 37-41 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.
Claim 26 lines 5 recites, “the information related to the tenant container”. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
Similarly, claim 37 lines 4-5.
Claim 27 line 1 recites, “the step of extracting …”. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
Claim 28 line 1 recites, “the step of identifying …”, line 2, “the filtering rules”, “the obtained attributes”. There is insufficient antecedent basis for these limitations in the claim.
Claim 29 line 2 recites, “the filtering rules”, “the obtained attributes”. There is insufficient antecedent basis for these limitations in the claim.
Similarly, claim 40 line 2.
Claim 34 line 1 recites, “the step of encrypting …”, line 8, “the filtering rules”, “the state of attributes”. There is insufficient antecedent basis for these limitations in the claim.
Claim 37 line 2 recites “the tenant”. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
Claim 38 line 1-2, “wherein, to extract the filtering rules” suggests the extracting has been recited in claim 35 that claim 38 depends upon. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
Claim 39 line 1-2, “wherein, to identify at least a part of the collected information …” suggests the identifying has been recited in claim 35 that claim 39 depends upon. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
Line 4 recites “the information related to the tenant container”. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
Claim 41 line 1-2, “wherein, to encrypt at least some of the filtered information …” suggests the encrypting has been recited in claim 35 that claim 41 depends upon. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
Line 8, “the filtering rules”, “the state of attributes”. There is insufficient antecedent basis for these limitations in the claim.
Examiner Notes
Examiner cites particular paragraphs, columns and line numbers in the references as applied to the claims below for the convenience of the applicant. Although the specified citations are representative of the teachings in the art and are applied to the specific limitations within the individual claim, other passages and figures may apply as well. It is respectfully requested that, in preparing responses, the applicant fully consider the references in entirety as potentially teaching all or part of the claimed invention, as well as the context of the passage as taught by the prior art or disclosed by the examiner.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
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 the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 24-25, 35-36 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Gehani et al (US20230289460A1, hereinafter, "Gehani").
Regarding claim 24, similarly claim 35, Gehani teaches:
A method/A computing device for securing a tenant container executed by a computing device, the method being performed by the computing device (Gehani, discloses systems and methods for providing sensitive dataflow tracking for containerized applications), the method comprising:
filtering information collected by a probe enabled within one or more processes being executed on the computing device to secure the tenant container (e.g., [0024] Embodiments consistent with the present disclosure advantageously accomplish this by doing application level process monitoring in a containerized environment using much more performance efficient techniques like eBPF (extended Berkley Packet Filter) or kernel extensions that augment the kernel with hooks to capture data and to do so more efficiently than what could be achieved using typical audit streams in the host. And [0031] The SDTS 120 performs application level process monitoring in a containerized environment using performance efficient techniques like eBPF (extended Berkley Packet Filter) or kernel extensions that sit in the kernel space and augment the kernel 142 with hooks to capture data and to do so more efficiently… And [0039] The taint storage 228 stores the provenance graph sent by the taint tracking kernel 226. The taint tracking kernel 226 uses one or more tools to prune/filter the provenance graph (i.e., OPM records 224) stored in the taint storage 228).
Regarding claim 25, similarly claim 36, Gehani teaches the method according to claim 24, the computing device according to claim 35,
Gehani further teaches: further comprising: encrypting at least some of the filtered information (e.g., [0024] When certain types of sensitive data is processed in computing environments, there may be stringent compliance requirements that specify what minimum security features need to be associated with interaction, storage and tracking of such sensitive data. Most of those compliance requirements require or request some type of tracking and protection to encrypt and control access to that sensitive data).
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 26, 37 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Gehani as applied above to claim 24, 35 respectively, in view of Ouyang (US20200274812A1, hereinafter, “Ouyang”), further in view of Banerjee et al (US20190104158A1, hereinafter, “Banerjee”).
Regarding claim 26, similarly claim 37, Gehani teaches the method according to claim 24, the computing device according to claim 35,
Gehani does not specifically teach, in the same field of endeavor Ouyang teaches:
wherein the step of filtering the collected information comprises: extracting filtering rules to be applied on the collected information (Ouyang, discloses system and methods for a traffic analysis, [Abstract]. And [0097] S503. The traffic filtering module 440 receives the traffic from the traffic parsing apparatus 300, obtains the application-service rule from the feature learning module 410);
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have employed the teachings of Ouyang in the sensitive dataflow tracking for containerized applications of Gehani by obtaining application-service rule. This would have been obvious because the person having ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to identify service or application to which traffic belongs for filtering the received traffic packet according to the application-service rule (Ouyang, [Abstract], [0097]).
The combination of Gehani and Ouyang does not specifically teach, in the same field of endeavor Banerjee teaches:
obtaining attributes related to one or more of: the computing device, the tenant container, the information related to the tenant container, and the probe (Banerjee, discloses system and method of networking flow logs for filtering network traffics, [Abstract]. And [0021] a customer may cause the logging entity or other component of the server computer system 108 to filter the log information based at least in part on one or more attributes of the log information. And [Claim 32] … cause the system to filter the obtained log information based at least in part on one or more attributes of the log information as a result of receiving, from the customer associated with the virtual computer system instance, a request to filter the obtained log information);
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have employed the teachings of Banerjee in the sensitive dataflow tracking for containerized applications of Gehani-Ouyang by filtering received log information based on attributes of the log information. This would have been obvious because the person having ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to provide computing resources to customers in a multi-tenant environment (Banerjee, [Abstract]).
The combination of Ouyang and Banerjee further teaches: identifying at least a part of the collected information to be filtered using the filtering rules and based on the obtained attributes; and filtering the identified information in accordance with the filtering rules and the attributes (Ouyang, [0097] S503. The traffic filtering module 440 receives the traffic from the traffic parsing apparatus 300, obtains the application-service rule from the feature learning module 410, filters a received packet according to the application-service rule, and sends, to a service identification module 420, a packet obtained through filtering. And Banerjee, [0021] a customer may cause the logging entity or other component of the server computer system 108 to filter the log information based at least in part on one or more attributes of the log information).
Claims 27-29, 38-40 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Gehani as applied above to claim 24, 35 respectively, in view of Ouyang (US20200274812A1, hereinafter, “Ouyang”).
Regarding claim 27, similarly claim 38, Gehani teaches the method according to claim 24, the computing device according to claim 35,
Gehani does not specifically teach, in the same field of endeavor Ouyang teaches:
wherein the step of extracting the filtering rules comprises receiving the filtering rules from one or more of: the tenant container; data sources residing within the computing device; and external data sources in communication with the computing device (Ouyang, discloses system and methods for a traffic analysis, [Abstract]. And [0097] S503. The traffic filtering module 440 receives the traffic from the traffic parsing apparatus 300, obtains the application-service rule from the feature learning module 410).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have employed the teachings of Ouyang in the sensitive dataflow tracking for containerized applications of Gehani by obtaining application-service rule. This would have been obvious because the person having ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to identify service or application to which traffic belongs for filtering the received traffic packet according to the application-service rule (Ouyang, [Abstract], [0097]).
Regarding claim 28, similarly claim 39, Gehani teaches the method according to claim 24, the computing device according to claim 35,
Gehani does not specifically teach, in the same field of endeavor Ouyang teaches:
wherein the step of identifying at least a part of the collected information using the filtering rules and based on the obtained attributes is based on one or more of: tags defined for at least some pieces of the information related to the tenant container; information related to the computing device; at least one functionality implemented by the tenant container; information related to one or more functions and/or libraries of the tenant container monitored by the probe; an identity, ID, of the probe; a recipient of the monitored information transmitted with transport layer security, TLS; and parsing of protocol headers and/or data encoding schemes associated with the information related to the tenant container that is to be secured (Ouyang, discloses system and methods for a traffic analysis, [Abstract]. And [0145] The method is performed by a service identification module 720. Input is a result of filtering current network traffic by a domain filtering module 741 and an application-service rule that is output by a feature learning module 710; and output is a service classification identification result. First, a single-user identification module 721 distinguishes between application traffic of a single user based on an IP, a session ID, a device ID, a user ID, or other identity identification information in the traffic obtained through filtering,…).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have employed the teachings of Ouyang in the sensitive dataflow tracking for containerized applications of Gehani by obtaining application-service rule. This would have been obvious because the person having ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to identify service or application to which traffic belongs for filtering the received traffic packet according to the application-service rule (Ouyang, [Abstract], [0097]).
Regarding claim 29, similarly claim 40, Gehani teaches the method according to claim 24, the computing device according to claim 35,
Gehani does not specifically teach, in the same field of endeavor Ouyang teaches:
wherein the step of filtering the collected information in accordance with the filtering rules and based on the attributes comprises: identifying a state of attributes of one or more of: the computing device, the probe enabled on the tenant container, at least one functionality of the tenant container that is being monitored by the probe, the tenant container, and the information related to the tenant container; evaluating the filtering rules with respect to the identifying state of attributes; activating, based on the evaluation, at least one filtering rule; and filtering at least some of the collected information of the tenant container in accordance with the activated at least one filtering rule (Ouyang, discloses system and methods for a traffic analysis, [Abstract]. And [0145] The method is performed by a service identification module 720. Input is a result of filtering current network traffic by a domain filtering module 741 and an application-service rule that is output by a feature learning module 710; and output is a service classification identification result. First, a single-user identification module 721 distinguishes between application traffic of a single user based on an IP, a session ID, a device ID, a user ID, or other identity identification information in the traffic obtained through filtering, and inputs the application traffic of the single user to a service classification module 722 (S1101). The service classification module 722 identifies a start service, an exclusive service, and a common service of each application in the traffic of the single user according to the application-service rule (S1102), and sends an identification result to a traffic attribution module 730. In the identification process, a packet feature in the traffic of the single user may be extracted for performing matching with an application-service rule one by one. If the matching succeeds, a matching process ends, and a service type and an application that correspond to a rule with which the matching succeeds are output).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have employed the teachings of Ouyang in the sensitive dataflow tracking for containerized applications of Gehani by obtaining application-service rule. This would have been obvious because the person having ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to identify service or application to which traffic belongs for filtering the received traffic packet according to the application-service rule (Ouyang, [Abstract], [0097]).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 30-34, 41 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim(s), but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims as well as resolving of any outstanding informalities and concerns under 35 USC 112(b) presented in this office action.
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter:
Claim 30 depends on claim 29 which depends on claim 24, further recites, “wherein the state of attributes of the computing device comprises one or more of: an identity of the computing device; a geographical location of the computing device; and a provider identity of the computing device”.
Claim 31 depends on claim 29 which depends on claim 24, further recites, “wherein the state of attributes of the probe enabled on the tenant container comprises one or more of: a provider identity associated with the probe; and one or more functionalities of the probe”.
Claim 32 depends on claim 29 which depends on claim 24, further recites, “wherein the state of attributes of the at least one functionality of the tenant container that is being monitored by the probe comprises one or more of: one or more functions and/or libraries being monitored by the probe; a functionality to which the monitored one or more functions and/or libraries belong to; a recipient of messages being transmitted from the at least one functionality; and service based architecture, SBA, services associated with the at least one functionality”.
Claim 33 depends on claim 29 which depends on claim 24, further recites, “wherein the state of attributes of the information related to the tenant container comprises one or more of: one or more tags, protocol specific fields, byte sequences, and data patterns associated with the information related to the tenant container”.
Claim 34 (similarly claim 41) depends on claim 24 (claim 35), further recites, “wherein the step of encrypting at least some of the filtered information collected by the probe comprises: extracting a plurality of cryptographic key materials from one or more of: the tenant container, data sources residing within the computing device, and external data sources in communication with the computing device; generating a plurality of encryption keys based on extraction of the plurality of cryptographic key materials; evaluating the filtering rules with respect to the state of attributes of at least one of: the computing device, the probe enabled on the tenant container, the at least one functionality of the tenant container that is being monitored by the probe enabled on the tenant container, the tenant container, and the information related to the tenant container; selecting, based on the evaluation, an encryption key from the plurality of encryption keys; and encrypting at least some of the filtered information related to the tenant container using the selected encryption key”.
The prior arts identified, either singularly or in combination fails to anticipate or render obvious the claimed limitations of claims shown above.
Citation of References
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. The following references are cited but not been replied upon for this office action:
Moore et al (US20220360598A1) discloses methods for efficient threat context aware packet filtering for network protection.
Rajagopal et al (US20150058923A1) discloses systems and methods of secure web container for secure online user environment.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to MICHAEL M LEE whose telephone number is (571)272-1975.
The examiner can normally be reached on M-F: 8:30AM - 5:30PM.
Examiner interviews are available via telephone, in-person, and video conferencing using a USPTO supplied web-based collaboration tool. To schedule an interview, applicant is encouraged to use the USPTO Automated Interview Request (AIR) at http://www.uspto.gov/interviewpractice.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Shewaye Gelagay can be reached on (571) 272-4219. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
Information regarding the status of an application may be obtained from the Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system. Status information for published applications may be obtained from either Private PAIR or Public PAIR. Status information for unpublished applications is available through Private PAIR only. For more information about the PAIR system, see http://pair-direct.uspto.gov. Should you have questions on access to the Private PAIR system, contact the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 (toll-free). If you would like assistance from a USPTO Customer Service Representative or access to the automated information system, call 800-786-9199 (IN USA OR CANADA) or 571-272-1000.
/MICHAEL M LEE/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2436
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