DETAILED ACTION
This action is in response to the claims filed 5/19/2025. Claims 1-10 are pending. Independent claim 1, and corresponding dependent claims are directed towards a method for real-time detection of site phishing using message passing neural networks (MPNN) on directed graphs.
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 .
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.
Double Patenting
The nonstatutory double patenting rejection is based on a judicially created doctrine grounded in public policy (a policy reflected in the statute) so as to prevent the unjustified or improper timewise extension of the “right to exclude” granted by a patent and to prevent possible harassment by multiple assignees. A nonstatutory double patenting rejection is appropriate where the conflicting claims are not identical, but at least one examined application claim is not patentably distinct from the reference claim(s) because the examined application claim is either anticipated by, or would have been obvious over, the reference claim(s). See, e.g., In re Berg, 140 F.3d 1428, 46 USPQ2d 1226 (Fed. Cir. 1998); In re Goodman, 11 F.3d 1046, 29 USPQ2d 2010 (Fed. Cir. 1993); In re Longi, 759 F.2d 887, 225 USPQ 645 (Fed. Cir. 1985); In re Van Ornum, 686 F.2d 937, 214 USPQ 761 (CCPA 1982); In re Vogel, 422 F.2d 438, 164 USPQ 619 (CCPA 1970); In re Thorington, 418 F.2d 528, 163 USPQ 644 (CCPA 1969).
A timely filed terminal disclaimer in compliance with 37 CFR 1.321(c) or 1.321(d) may be used to overcome an actual or provisional rejection based on nonstatutory double patenting provided the reference application or patent either is shown to be commonly owned with the examined application, or claims an invention made as a result of activities undertaken within the scope of a joint research agreement. See MPEP § 717.02 for applications subject to examination under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA as explained in MPEP § 2159. See MPEP §§ 706.02(l)(1) - 706.02(l)(3) for applications not subject to examination under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA . A terminal disclaimer must be signed in compliance with 37 CFR 1.321(b).
The USPTO Internet website contains terminal disclaimer forms which may be used. Please visit www.uspto.gov/patent/patents-forms. The filing date of the application in which the form is filed determines what form (e.g., PTO/SB/25, PTO/SB/26, PTO/AIA /25, or PTO/AIA /26) should be used. A web-based eTerminal Disclaimer may be filled out completely online using web-screens. An eTerminal Disclaimer that meets all requirements is auto-processed and approved immediately upon submission. For more information about eTerminal Disclaimers, refer to www.uspto.gov/patents/process/file/efs/guidance/eTD-info-I.jsp.
Claims 1, 4 and 8-9 are rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over claims 1,3, 8 and 15 of U.S. Patent No. 12,309,197. Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because of subject matter indicated below:
Application 19/211547
US Patent No. 12,309,197
Claim 1
Claim 1
Claim 4
Claim 3
Claim 8
Claim 8
Claim 9
Claim 15
Specification
The disclosure is objected to because of the following informalities: the first recitation of the following acronyms is not expanded: [0003] DOM, [0015] BERT, [0020] DNS CNAME, [0021]HTTP and XML, [0031] JSON, [0034] NLP, [0036] ICLR, [0038] SIEM, and [0058] CD-ROM; [0023] “leverage” should be “leverages”. Appropriate correction is required.
Claim Objections
Claim 9 is objected to because of the following informalities, shown with suggested amendments: Claim 9 l. 1 “training date set” should be “training data set”. Appropriate correction is required.
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 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.
Claims 1-5 and 9-10 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ouyang et al., “Phishing Web Page Detection with HTML-Level Graph Neural Network”, published Mar. 9, 2022, in view of Meisel (US 2009/0328187 A1), published Dec. 31, 2009.
As to claim 1, Ouyang substantially discloses a method of real-time protection of a site from a social engineering attack (Ouyang [Abstract]), comprising: during an interaction (Ouyang §III¶1 HTML document as input and outputs possibility that it is a phishing page; §IV(A)¶1 collecting real world samples of phishing and benign web pages): harvesting the site by obtaining a markup language page associated with the site (Ouyang §IV(A)¶2 crawling URLs to obtain HTML content); generating a Document Object Model (DOM) of the markup language page associated with the site (Ouyang §III(A)¶1 convert raw HTML inputs into DOM trees); generating one or more graphs from the DOM, wherein a graph represents a feature in the markup language page (Ouyang §III(A)¶2 build graph based on DOM tree including features of nodes (elements of HTML)); applying a representation derived from the one or more graphs through a Message Passing Neural Network (MPNN), the MPNN having been trained by analyzing interactions between connected markup language page nodes of sites in a training data set (Ouyang §III(B)¶1 use graph convolutional network (GCN) with message passing to process graph; §III(C) outputting the probability that the sample is a phishing page; §IV(A)¶4 training dataset); determining that the markup language page is a phishing page, taking an action (Ouyang §III(C) outputting the probability that the sample is a phishing page). Ouyang fails to explicitly disclose an interaction between a requesting client and an online system protecting the site; and responsive to a determination taking an action to protect the site. Meisel describes a distributed web application firewall. With this in mind, Meisel discloses an interaction between a requesting client and an online system protecting the site (Meisel Fig. 1 showing client 105 and web application firewall (WAF) 103; [0057]); and responsive to a determination taking an action to protect the site (Meisel [0051] block harmful requests based on rules or learned inference from experience). It would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains to combine the phishing webpage detection of Ouyang with the distributed firewall of Meisel, such that the phishing detection is implemented against requests to a site protected by a web application firewall, as it would advantageously assist in preventing phishing attacks (Meisel [0043]).
As to claim 2, Ouyang and Meisel disclose the invention as claimed as described in claim 1, including wherein the action blocks a request received from the requesting client (Meisel [0051] block harmful requests based on rules or learned inference from experience).
As to claim 3, Ouyang and Meisel disclose the invention as claimed as described in claim 1, including wherein the determination occurs on a timing scale on an order of one (1) second (Ouyang Table I showing test dataset with a size of 59966 samples; Table II showing test time of 124 seconds for the test data set – corresponding to approximately .002 seconds per sample).
As to claim 4, Ouyang and Meisel disclose the invention as claimed as described in claim 1, including wherein the feature is one of: a link (Ouyang Fig. 1 showing node information including tag attribute “action” with phishing URL – node features include link), a markup language inner text (optional – not required), and a combination of a link and markup language inner text (optional – not required).
As to claim 5, Ouyang and Meisel disclose the invention as claimed as described in claim 1, including wherein the graph is a directed graph (Ouyang §III(A)¶1-2 DOM tree structure treated as graph – DOM tree is inherently directional (i.e. parent child relationships); §III(B)¶3 graph represents structure of DOM tree as G = (V,E) where V are the nodes and E are the edges between nodes).
As to claim 9, Ouyang and Meisel disclose the invention as claimed as described in claim 1, including wherein the training date set comprises markup language page nodes of benign sites and phishing sites (Ouyang Table I showing test dataset with benign and phishing samples).
As to claim 10, Ouyang and Meisel disclose the invention as claimed as described in claim 1, including wherein the determination is also based on an analysis associated with a second detection algorithm (Meisel [0051] blocking requests based on detection rules and also based on a learning algorithm).
Claims 6-7 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ouyang et al., “Phishing Web Page Detection with HTML-Level Graph Neural Network”, published Mar. 9, 2022, in view of Meisel (US 2009/0328187 A1), published Dec. 31, 2009, in view of Grinman (US 2022/0329579 A1), published Oct. 13, 2022.
As to claim 6, Ouyang and Meisel substantially disclose the invention as claimed as described in claim 1, failing, however, to explicitly disclose wherein the online system is associated with an overlay network. Grinman describes an end-to-end verifiable multi-factor authentication service. With this in mind, Grinman discloses an online system associated with an overlay network (Grinman [0016] authentication service implemented by an overlay network provider that is a CDN). It would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains to combine the phishing detection of Ouyang and Meisel with the authentication service of Grinman, such that the phishing detection is implemented in the overlay network, as it would advantageously prevent phishing of a popular vendor (Grinman [0003]).
As to claim 7, Ouyang, Meisel and Ginman disclose the invention as claimed as described in claim 6, including wherein the overlay network is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) (Grinman [0016] authentication service implemented by an overlay network provider that is a CDN).
Claim 8 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ouyang et al., “Phishing Web Page Detection with HTML-Level Graph Neural Network”, published Mar. 9, 2022, in view of Meisel (US 2009/0328187 A1), published Dec. 31, 2009, in view of Clinchant et al. (US 2023/0418848 A1), published Dec. 28, 2023.
As to claim 8, Ouyang and Meisel substantially disclose the invention as claimed as described in claim 1, including wherein the representation is an output of a language encoder (Ouyang §III¶1 RNN and embedding method used to encode nodes into learnable vectors; §III(A)¶3 encoding elements). Ouyang and Meisel fail to explicitly disclose wherein the language encoder is pretrained. Clinchant describes a neural ranking model for generating sparse representations for information retrieval. With this in mind, Clinchant discloses wherein the language encoder is pretrained (Clinchant [0212] pretraining a language model of an encoder). It would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains to combine the pretraining of Clinchant with the language model of Ouyang and Meisel, such that the encoding is pretrained, as it would advantageously obtain a richer semantic representation of webpage text before graph processing.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Corona et al., “DeltaPhish: Detecting Phishing Webpages in Compromised Websites” is related to phishing detection.
Hunt et al. (US 11,165,822 B2) is related to identifying phishing sites using DOM characteristics.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to ERIC W SHEPPERD whose telephone number is (571)270-5654. The examiner can normally be reached Monday - Thursday, Alt. Friday, 7:30AM - 5:00PM, EST.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Rupal Dharia can be reached at (571)272-3880. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/Eric W Shepperd/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2492
