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 Office Action is responsive to application 19/054,594 that the Applicant filed on February 14, 2025 and presented 20 claims. Original claims 1-20 remain pending in the application.
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.
Claim 2 is 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 2 recites “the data logged,” but claim 1 only recites process data and augmented data. Accordingly, the antecedent basis issue makes claim 1 indefinite. Claim 3 is similarly rejected since it depends on claim 2 and fails to remedy the issue of indefiniteness.
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.
The following conventions apply to the mapping of the prior art to the claims:
Italicized text – claim language.
Parenthetical plain text – Examiner’s citation and explanation.
Citation without an explanation – an explanation has been previously provided for the respective limitation(s).
Quotation marks – language quoted from a prior art reference.
Underlining – language quoted from a claim.
Brackets – material altered from either a prior art reference or a claim, which includes the Examiner’s explanation that relates a claim limitation to the quoted material of a reference.
Braces – a limitation taught by another reference, but the limitation is presented with the mapping of the instant reference for context.
Numbered superscript – a first phrase to be moved upwards to the primary reference analysis.
Lettered superscript – a second phrase to be moved after the movement of the first phrase from which it was lifted, or more succinctly, move numbered material first, lettered material last.
A. Claims 1, 4-6, 9-11, 13-15, 17, and 19-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Erlingsson et al. (US 2023/0344845, “Erlingsson”) in view of Xiao et al. (US 2021/0194853, “Xiao”).
Regarding Claim 1
Erlingsson discloses
A non-transitory machine readable medium storing instructions (¶¶ [0083]-[0085], “In some examples, a non-transitory computer-readable medium storing computer-readable instructions may be provided in accordance with the principles described herein. The instructions, when executed by a processor of a computing device, may direct the processor and/or computing device to perform one or more operations, including one or more of the operations described herein.”), which when executed by one or more processing resources (¶¶ [0083]-[0085], “The instructions, when executed by a processor [processing resource]...”) of a cluster of a container orchestration platform (¶ [0702], “As one example of a special purpose environment, consider an example in which the data platforms described herein are used to analyze, monitor, or otherwise observe a container orchestration environment [platform] such as a Kubernetes cluster (which may be deployed on-premises, in a public cloud, or in some other way).”), cause an application running within the cluster (¶ [0175], “As desired, user B can click on one of the clusters (e.g., cluster 261) and be presented with summary information about the applications included [running] in the cluster...”) to:
learn, by a machine-learning (ML) algorithm, normal behavior of a plurality of user roles associated with the application (¶ [0150], “Histograms allow data platform 12 to model [and learn] application behavior (e.g., using machine learning techniques [algorithms]), for establishing baselines [normal behavior], and for detecting deviations.”; and ¶¶ [0411]-[0412], “Administrators [with their respective roles associated with the application] and other users of network environments [with their respective roles associated with the application] (e.g., entity A's datacenter 104) often change [user] roles to perform tasks. As one example, suppose that at the start of a workday, an administrator (hereinafter ‘Joe Smith’) logs in to a console, using an individualized account (e.g., username=joe.smith). Joe performs various tasks as himself (e.g., answering emails, generating status reports, writing code, etc.). For other tasks (e.g., performing updates), Joe may require different/additional permission than his individual account has (e.g., root privileges).”; see also Miriyala ¶¶ [0321]-[0324], “Role bindings can grant permissions defined in a role (e.g., the access control policy for the role [associated with the application]) to a user or a set of users,”)
by processing data
(i) extracted from a log created by…1 of the cluster relating to a plurality of events within the cluster (¶ [0702], “In such an example, the data platform may be configured to ingest [to process data after extracting] Kubernetes [cluster] audit logs via one or more agents or in some other way. Through the ingestion and subsequent analysis [processing] of such audit logs [relating to a plurality of events1], the data platform may model normal behaviors of a Kubernetes cluster, normal behavior of a cluster administrator, and so on.”) and
(ii) 2…indicative of a particular user role of the plurality of user roles associated with the event and an anomaly threshold associated with the particular user role (¶¶ [0411]-[0413], “Administrators and other users of network environments (e.g., entity A's datacenter 104) often change [user] roles to perform tasks [comprising events].”; and “Using techniques described herein, the behavior of users [as events that are associated with roles] of the environment can be tracked (including across multiple accounts [comprising processed data that has been augmented with information indicative of a particular user role with each account correlated to a role] and/or multiple machines) and modeled (e.g., using various graphs described herein). Such models can be used [via process data] to generate alerts (e.g., to anomalous user behavior)….”);
responsive to processing of the augmented data for a particular event of the plurality of events (¶¶ [0411]-[0413]), determine, by the ML algorithm (¶ [0150]), an anomaly score, indicative of a degree of deviation from the normal behavior of the particular user role associated with the particular event (¶ [0198], “Alert generator 158 is a microservice that may be responsible for generating alerts. Alert generator 158 may examine observations (e.g., produced by GBM [graph behavior modeler] 154) in aggregate, deduplicate them, and score them. Alerts may be generated for observations [of a particular event associated with a particular user role that deviate from the normal behavior] with a [anomaly] score exceeding a threshold.”); and
based on a comparison between the anomaly score and the anomaly threshold specified for the particular user role (¶ [0198]), trigger a predefined or configurable action (¶ [0632], “In some embodiments, the distributions may be used to identify ‘normal’ behavior for a particular cluster.”; and “As such, if monitoring a particular cluster revealed that some member of the cluster set accessed a source code repository cloud service (e.g., GitHub Enterprise on AWS), this sort of access would be outside of the typical distribution for this cluster [and yielding an actionable anomaly score] set and could serve as the basis for raising an alert, [trigger] denying access to the service [as a predefined or configurable action], or initiating some other alerting/remediation workflow.”).
Erlingsson doesn’t disclose
1 … an application programming interface (API) server…
2 augmented, for each event of the plurality of events, with information…
Xiao, however, discloses
1 … an application programming interface (API) server… (¶ [0079], “Log infrastructure 250 also includes an API server 254 to facilitate access [extract] to the collected logging data for security/threat analysis (e.g., to associate threat intelligence horizontally and vertically and generate actionable threat intelligence) as further described below.”)
Regarding the combination of Erlingsson and Xiao, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the orchestration system of Erlingsson to arrive at the claimed invention. KSR establishes that a rationale for obviousness is proven by showing a “use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way.” See MPEP § 2143(I)(C).
To substantiate the conclusion of obviousness under this KSR rationale, the Examiner finds pursuant to MPEP § 2143(I)(C):
1) the prior art contained a base system, namely the orchestration system of Erlingsson, upon which the claimed invention can be seen as an “improvement” through the use of an API server;
2) the prior art contained a “comparable” system, namely the container system of Xiao, that has been improved in the same way as the claimed invention through the API server; and
3) one of ordinary skill in the art could have applied the known improvement technique of applying the API server to the base orchestration system of Erlingsson, and the results would have been predictable to one of ordinary skill in the art.
Biswas, however, discloses
2 augmented, for each event of the plurality of events, with information… (¶¶ [0183]-[0184], “For example, an event attributed to a particular user ID may use the user ID to reference additional information in the knowledge base related to the event type, the user, security credentials for the user [associated with roles], and so forth. Therefore, the knowledge base may be used to augment information received by the audit trail log to generate a complete picture of all the details surrounding a particular event.”)
Regarding the combination of Erlingsson-Xiao and Biswas, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the orchestration system of Erlingsson-Xiao to arrive at the claimed invention. KSR establishes that a rationale for obviousness is proven by showing a “use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way.” See MPEP § 2143(I)(C).
To substantiate the conclusion of obviousness under this KSR rationale, the Examiner finds pursuant to MPEP § 2143(I)(C):
1) the prior art contained a base system, namely the orchestration system of Erlingsson-Xiao, upon which the claimed invention can be seen as an “improvement” through the use of an information augmentation feature;
2) the prior art contained a “comparable” system, namely the container system of Biswas, that has been improved in the same way as the claimed invention through the information augmentation feature; and
3) one of ordinary skill in the art could have applied the known improvement technique of applying the information augmentation feature to the base orchestration system of Erlingsson-Xiao, and the results would have been predictable to one of ordinary skill in the art.
Regarding Claim 4
Erlingsson in view of Xiao, and further in view of Biswas (“Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas”) discloses the method of claim 1, and Erlingsson further discloses
wherein the predefined or configurable action comprises one or more of: alerting an administrative user of the cluster or the application; temporarily revoking permissions of the particular user to access the cluster or the application; logging the particular user out of the cluster or the application and prompting the particular user to change their user credentials via an out-of-band communication channel; and denying a particular interaction by the particular user with the application (¶ [0632], “In some embodiments, the distributions may be used to identify ‘normal’ behavior for a particular cluster [user thereof].”; and “As such, if monitoring a particular cluster revealed that some member [user] of the cluster set accessed a source code repository cloud service (e.g., GitHub Enterprise on AWS), this sort of access would be outside of the typical distribution for this cluster [and yielding an actionable anomaly score] set and could serve as the basis for raising an alert, [trigger] denying access to the service [as a predefined or configurable action], or initiating some other alerting/remediation workflow.”).
Regarding Claim 5
Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas discloses the method of claim 4, and Erlingsson further discloses
wherein the predefined or configurable action is taken prior to allowing the request with which the particular event is associated to proceed (¶ [0569], “In some embodiments, event data can be combined with contextual information about users, assets, threats, vulnerabilities, and so on, for the purposes of scoring, prioritization and expediting investigations [to enable an alert prior to allowing the request]. ... The embodiments described here offer real-time analysis [so that an alert is provided before an event to prevent the anomalous from harming the system] of events for security monitoring, advanced analysis of user and entity behaviors, querying and long-range analytics for historical analysis, other support for incident investigation and management, reporting (for compliance requirements, for example), and other functionality.”).
Regarding Claim 6
Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas discloses the method of claim 1, and Erlingsson further discloses
wherein the ML algorithm comprises Random Cut Forest (¶ [0238], “One example approach to making a CmdType model is a random forest based approach.”).
Regarding Claim 8
Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas discloses the method of claim 1, and Erlingsson further discloses
wherein the instructions (¶¶ [0083]-[0085]) further cause the application to prior to augmentation of the data, combine the data with another data source including, for each API call to an API of the application, information regarding a path of the API call and the given user of the plurality of users by which the API call was initiated.
Regarding Claim 9
Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas discloses the method of claim 1, and Erlingsson further discloses
wherein the ML algorithm is implemented by a microservice associated with the application (¶ [0152], “Agent service 132 is a microservice that is responsible for accepting data collected [to implement the ML algorithm] from agents (e.g., provided by aggregator 114);” and ¶ [0582], “In such an example, the systems described herein may perform various functions as part of an AutoML tool such as, for example, monitoring the performance of a series of processes, microservices,…”).
Regarding Claim 10
Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas discloses the method of claim 1, and Erlingsson further discloses
wherein the ML algorithm is implemented external to the application as part of a cloud-based solution (¶ [0583], “In some embodiments, the systems described herein may be used to manage, analyze, or otherwise observe deployments that include other forms of AI/ML tools. For example, the systems described herein may manage, analyze, or otherwise observe deployments that include AI services. AI services are, like other resources in an as-a-service model [that are implemented external to the application as part of a cloud-based solution], ready-made models and AI applications that are consumable as services and made available through APIs;” and “Likewise, the systems described herein may be used to manage, analyze, or otherwise observe deployments that include other forms of AI/ML tools such as Amazon Sagemaker (or other cloud machine-learning platform [as cloud-based solutions] that enables developers to create, train, and deploy ML models) and related services such as Data Wrangler (a service to accelerate data prep for ML) and Pipelines (a CI/CD service for ML).”).
Regarding Independent Claim 11
With respect to independent claim 11, a corresponding reasoning as given earlier for independent claim 1 applies, mutatis mutandis, to the subject matter of claim 11. Therefore, claim 11 is rejected, for similar reasons, under the grounds set forth for claim 1. The Examiner notes, however, that claim 11 includes one additional limitation over that of claim 1, which is “identifying existence of credential misuse by the user that initiated the particular event or a stolen credential of the user.” This limitation is taught or suggested by Erlingsson at ¶ [0445], “Suppose Bill's credentials are compromised [misused] by a nefarious outsider (“Eve”). FIG. 4D depicts an embodiment of how the graph depicted in FIG. 4C would appear [identifying the existence of misuse] once Eve begins exfiltrating data from the datacenter.”
Regarding Claim 13
Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas discloses the method of claim 1, and Erlingsson further discloses
further comprising after said identifying existence of credential misuse by the user that initiated the particular event or a stolen credential of the user (¶ [0445]),
triggering a predefined or configurable action (¶ [0445], “As previously mentioned, such changes can be detected as anomalies and associated alerts can be generated.”).
Regarding Claim 14
Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas discloses the method of claim 13, and Erlingsson further discloses
wherein the predefined or configurable action comprises one or more of: alerting an administrative user of the cluster or the application; temporarily revoking permissions of the user to access the cluster or the application; logging the user out of the cluster or the application and prompting the user to change their user credentials via an out-of-band communication channel; and denying a particular interaction by the user with the application (¶ [0445], “As previously mentioned, such changes can be detected as anomalies and associated alerts [an administrative user] can be generated.”).
Regarding Claim 15
Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas discloses the method of claim 14, and Erlingsson further discloses
wherein the predefined or configurable action is taken (¶ [0445]) prior to allowing the request with which the particular event is associated to proceed (¶ [0609], “Prevention and protection against security threats...”; and ¶ [0666], “…or some other configuration that would be useful in detecting/preventing/mitigating a security threat.”).
Regarding Independent Claim 17
With respect to independent claim 17, a corresponding reasoning as given earlier for independent claim 11 applies, mutatis mutandis, to the subject matter of claim 17. Therefore, claim 17 is rejected, for similar reasons, under the grounds set forth for claim 11.
Regarding Claims 19 and 20
With respect to dependent claims 19 and 20, a corresponding reasoning as given earlier for dependent claims 13 and 14 applies, mutatis mutandis, to the subject matter of claims 19 and 20. Therefore, claims 19 and 20 are rejected, for similar reasons, under the grounds set forth for claims 13 and 14.
B. Claim 2 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Erlingsson in view of Xiao and Biswas, and further in view of Miriyala et al. (US 2023/0104368, “Miriyala,” see attached Provisional Application 63/362,319 to which Miriyala claims priority).
Regarding Claim 2
Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas discloses the method of claim 1, and Erlingsson further discloses
wherein the data logged by the {API server (Xiao ¶ [0079])}for a given event of the plurality of events (¶¶ [0411]-[0413], [0702]) includes information…1 (¶ [0702], “In such an example, the data platform may be configured to ingest Kubernetes audit logs [recording requests made by the API Server, see Miriyala below] via one or more agents or in some other way.”) with which the given event is associated and a given user of a plurality of users associated with the application by which the given event was initiated (¶¶ [0411]-[0413]).
Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas doesn’t disclose
1 …regarding a request made to an API exposed by the API server...
Miriyala, however, discloses
1 …regarding a request made to an API exposed by the API server… (Fig. 3, ¶ [0158], “Usually, each resource in the Kubernetes API requires code that handles REST [Representational State Transfer as an application programming interface to the API Server 300, see Fig.3] requests [as events within a cluster] and manages persistent storage of objects. The main Kubernetes API server 300 (implemented with API server microservices 300A-300J) handles native resources and can also generically handle custom resources through CRDs [custom resource definitions];” and ¶ [0326], “The one or more configuration nodes 230 include an application programming interface (API) server 300 to process requests for operations on native resources [that exposes the API server] of a container orchestration system and include a custom API server 301 to process requests for operations on custom resources for SDN architecture configuration. The request may specify a plurality of functions of an aggregated API 402 provided by the custom API server 301 and the API server 300.”).
Regarding the combination of Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas and Miriyala, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the orchestration system of Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas to arrive at the claimed invention. KSR establishes that a rationale for obviousness is proven by showing a “use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way.” See MPEP § 2143(I)(C).
To substantiate the conclusion of obviousness under this KSR rationale, the Examiner finds pursuant to MPEP § 2143(I)(C):
1) the prior art contained a base system, namely the orchestration system of Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas, upon which the claimed invention can be seen as an “improvement” through the use of an API-server requests;
2) the prior art contained a “comparable” system, namely the container system of Miriyala, that has been improved in the same way as the claimed invention through the API-server requests; and
3) one of ordinary skill in the art could have applied the known improvement technique of applying the API-server requests to the base orchestration system of Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas, and the results would have been predictable to one of ordinary skill in the art.
C. Claims 3, 12, and 18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Erlingsson in view of Xiao and Miriyala, and further in view of Mitra et al. (US 2021/0318898, “Mitra”).
Regarding Claim 3
Erlingsson in view of Xiao, and further in view of Miriyala (“Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas-Miriyala”) discloses the method of claim 2, and Xiao further discloses
wherein the data logged by the API server further includes a source Internet Protocol (IP) address from which the given event was initiated (¶ [0098], “...also provides APIs for managing the containers, such as the following APIs: query_connection_info(vuln_profile) and disconnect(conn_info)). For each of the alive containers, the orchestration server provides the access point (e.g., IP address and port number) to smart proxy 528 using a channel (e.g., using Redis/Log 544 to maintain a dynamic database of container status).;” and “The orchestration server can also communicate [about events] with one or more databases (e.g., including resource databases that can store container image configurations (e.g., port, vulnerabilities, etc.) and customer configurations, such as similarly discussed above with respect to resource database (DB) 234 as shown in and described above with respect to FIG. 2).”) and …1.
Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas-Miriyala doesn’t disclose
1 … wherein the data is further augmented with information indicative of a distance of the source IP address from the cluster.
Mitra, however, discloses
1 … wherein the data is further augmented with information indicative of a distance of the source IP address from the cluster (¶ [0042], “A feature vector [encompassing the IP address from the cluster] can be constructed from designated metrics (e.g., normalized metrics) and used as an input to train anomaly detector 110 with the training data to detect an anomaly on a node of the tenant based on the distance between the feature vector and the centroids of k-means clusters.”).
Regarding the combination of Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas-Miriyala and Mitra, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the orchestration system of Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas-Miriyala to arrive at the claimed invention. KSR establishes that a rationale for obviousness is proven by showing a “use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way.” See MPEP § 2143(I)(C).
To substantiate the conclusion of obviousness under this KSR rationale, the Examiner finds pursuant to MPEP § 2143(I)(C):
1) the prior art contained a base system, namely the orchestration system of Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas-Miriyala, upon which the claimed invention can be seen as an “improvement” through the use of a machine-learning distance feature;
2) the prior art contained a “comparable” system, namely the network system of Mitra, that has been improved in the same way as the claimed invention through the machine-learning distance feature; and
3) one of ordinary skill in the art could have applied the known improvement technique of applying the machine-learning distance feature to the base orchestration system of Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas-Miriyala, and the results would have been predictable to one of ordinary skill in the art.
Regarding Claims 12 and 18
With respect to dependent claims 12 and 18, a corresponding reasoning as given earlier for dependent claim 3 applies, mutatis mutandis, to the subject matter of claims 12 and 18. Therefore, claims 12 and 18 are rejected, for similar reasons, under the grounds set forth for claim 3.
D. Claim 7 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Erlingsson in view of Xiao and Miriyala, and further in view of Tootaghaj et al. (US 11,436,054, “Tootaghaj”).
Regarding Claim 7
Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas discloses the method of claim 1, and Erlingsson further discloses
wherein the instructions (¶¶ [0083]-[0085]) further cause the application (¶ [0175]) to create new features within the augmented data for processing by the ML algorithm,
1 ….
Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas-Miriyala doesn’t disclose
1 including a count of requests received by the API server over a plurality of rolling time windows.
Tootaghaj, however, discloses
1 including a count of requests received by the API server over a plurality of rolling time windows (Col 18:28-63, “http_requests_total, representing a count of the total number of HTTP requests [associated with REST and the API server] received during the [rolling time] window”).
Regarding the combination of Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas and Tootaghaj, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the orchestration system of Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas to arrive at the claimed invention. KSR establishes that a rationale for obviousness is proven by showing a “use of [a] known technique to improve similar devices in the same way.” See MPEP § 2143(I)(C).
To substantiate the conclusion of obviousness under this KSR rationale, the Examiner finds pursuant to MPEP § 2143(I)(C):
1) the prior art contained a base system, namely the orchestration system of Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas, upon which the claimed invention can be seen as an “improvement” through the use of a count feature;
2) the prior art contained a “comparable” system, namely the orchestration system of Tootaghaj, that has been improved in the same way as the claimed invention through the count feature; and
3) one of ordinary skill in the art could have applied the known improvement technique of applying the count feature to the base orchestration system of Erlingsson-Xiao-Biswas, and the results would have been predictable to one of ordinary skill in the art.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 8 and 16 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
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to D'ARCY WINSTON STRAUB whose telephone number is (303)297-4405. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 9:00-5:00 Mountain Time.
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/D'Arcy Winston Straub/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2491
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