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
Claims 1-5 are pending in this office action.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statements (IDS) submitted on July 11, 2025, February 13, 2026, and July 13, 2026, are in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
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 1-5 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Morikawa et al. (A Proposal of Threat Analysis for Adversarial Machine Learning, Proceedings of Computer Security Symposium, provided on IDS).
Regarding claims 1, 4, and 5, Morikawa et al. teaches a non-transitory computer-readable recording medium having stored therein a generation program that causes a computer to execute a process comprising: acquiring tree structure information indicating a structure of an attack tree including a plurality of subtrees, the attack tree including pieces of information of a plurality of first nodes each of which is a root node of the plurality of subtrees and with which information indicating an attack that is established is associated and a plurality of second nodes that is hierarchically connected to each of the plurality of first nodes and with which a first condition for establishing the attack is associated ("synthetic attack trees" composed of various attack methods and goals. See Section 4: "We construct a tree of likelihoods by using a single composite attack tree." Section 1, second paragraph: "The attack tree used to calculate the likelihood of a threat... has the following features." There are root nodes (threats) and child nodes (conditions/methods). See Section 3.1 on p. 1373: "An attack tree is a tree-structured data structure in which individual threats (for example, the goal of an attack) are the root nodes, and the conditions for achieving the parent nodes and attack methods are summarized as child nodes); acquiring a damage degree in a case where the attack associated with each of the plurality of first nodes is established ("Impact" score based on expected damage. See Section 3.1 on p. 1373: " ... the impact is calculated based on the value of the protected assets that will be lost and the magnitude of the expected damage." Section 4.2.2: "Analysts score each data item based on ... the impact of leakage/modification”); acquiring a first easiness degree indicating easiness of satisfying the first condition associated with each end node among the plurality of second nodes (scores the "Likelihood" of leaf nodes based on the "ease" of the attack. See Section 3.1 on p. 1373: "The likelihood is calculated based on the ease and feasibility of the attack ... " Section 4.2.2: "Analysts score each data item based on the possibility of manipulation/obtainment by an attacker ... scored on a five-point scale from 1 (low) to 5 (high)."); calculating a second easiness degree indicating easiness of the attack for each of the plurality of first nodes based on the acquired tree structure information and the acquired first easiness degree (propagates the likelihood scores from the leaves to the root using logical operators (AND/OR). See Section 4.2.2: "The attack likelihood is calculated using the attack tree ... calculated using the following formulas: Likelihood OR= max(Likelihood 1 ... Likelihood n) Likelihood AND= min(Likelihood 1 ... Likelihood n)"); calculating, for each of the plurality of first nodes, priority for taking a countermeasure against the attack associated with the first node based on the damage degree and the second easiness degree (calculates a "Risk level" by combining Likelihood (Easiness) and Impact {Damage), which is used to determine priority. See Section 4.2.2: "Risk level = L Likelihood x lmpact/5 J + 1 "; Section 3.1: "The calculated risk level will be the basis for determining the priority of the threat to be dealt with ...”); and outputting the priority and information indicating the subtree including the first node corresponding to the priority (outputs tables listing threats and their calculated risk levels (priorities). See Table 4: "Analysis results for different subjects ... Threat Items ... Risk level"; Section 5.2: "The analysis results are shown in Table 5.").
Regarding claim 2, Morikawa et al. teaches the process further including: further acquiring condition matching status information indicating whether or not each of the first conditions associated with the respective end nodes among the plurality of second nodes is satisfied; and calculating the second easiness degree based on the acquired condition matching status information in addition to the tree structure information and the first easiness degree (estimating the likelihood (a theoretical score of 1-5)).
Regarding claim 3, Morikawa et al. teaches wherein: the processing of calculating the second easiness degree for each of the plurality of first nodes includes processing of executing the following processing from the end nodes toward a higher hierarchy among the plurality of second nodes of each subtree, the following processing including processing of in a case where the second node is an operator and the first condition associated with the operator is a logical sum, calculating a value larger than a maximum value of the first easiness degrees associated with other plurality of the second nodes connected to a lower hierarchy of the operator as an easiness degree of a node connected to a higher hierarchy of the operator, and in a case where the second node is an operator and the first condition associated with the operator is a logical product, calculating a value smaller than a minimum value of the first easiness degrees associated with other plurality of the second nodes connected to a lower hierarchy of the operator as an easiness degree of a node connected to a higher hierarchy of the operator (uses a best shot approximation by strictly taking the Min or Max value (Section 4.2.2)).
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to BRANDON HOFFMAN whose telephone number is (571)272-3863. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 8:30AM-5:00PM.
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/BRANDON HOFFMAN/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2433
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