[tahoe-dev] Surely M$ can patent this process?

Gary Sumner garysu at seventh-symbol.net
Sat Jan 26 20:44:27 PST 2008


I was researching on the weekend and came across Tahoe.very exciting and
can't wait to delve in and understand more in detail. 

 

I was reading over Plank's work around erasure encoding and that lead me to
Tahoe. One thing that I was really looking for was to be able to encrypt the
data before storing it  and so was very excited when I read your
architecture doc and it says "When a file is to be added to the grid, it is
first encrypted using a key that is derived from the hash of the file
itself." This seems perfectly logical and natural way to apply this
technique. However, researching also lead me to a patent M$ has been granted
on this exact process:

 

Encryption Systems and Methods for Identifying and Coalescing Identical
Objects Encrypted with Different Keys -
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2
<http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2F
netahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=6983365.PN.
&OS=PN/6983365&RS=PN/6983365>
&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AN
D&d=PTXT&s1=6983365.PN.&OS=PN/6983365&RS=PN/6983365

 

The encryption before storing is critical for my application. Surely there
must be prior art on this technique to refute this patent?

 

Thoughts.

 

Gary.

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