Digital Commons Network^™

Secure Smart Traffic Light System Using Auxiliary Data In Cooperative Awareness Message, Jayashree Panda, Priyanka Bansal, Raghu Rajendra Arur, Ganesh Kondaveeti, Poornima Angaragatti

Defensive Publications Series

Current smart traffic lights (STLs) can provide access to a traffic signal, which a vehicle, such as an emergency vehicle, can manipulate through a Cooperative Awareness Message (CAM) object. However, researchers have demonstrated that STLs can be easily hacked using an abusive CAM object. To address such a weakness, techniques are presented herein that secure a STL with auxiliary data that is attached to a CAM object, which can be used by a vehicle on-board unit (OBU) and smartphones. Aspects of the presented techniques reduce the encryption and decryption overhead that is incurred when attaching a security header as part …

Generative Software Architecture Oracle, Sam Lin, Larry Sun

Defensive Publications Series

A system may assist the development-to-deployment workflow by presenting information about the architecture of a software system in real-time to facilitate understanding of the architecture. The system may analyze metadata collected from the software system to extract information about the code dependency and performance of at least a portion of the software system from end-to-end. In some examples, the system may predict the results of software testing based on the extracted information, which may help with identifying redundant testing that can be omitted from the development-to-deployment workflow.

Web Workers For Software Attestation, Will Drewry, Radoslav Vasilev

Defensive Publications Series

Theft of browser authentication cookies is a serious security problem. Cookies stolen, e.g., by copying from disk and transmitting to another machine the cookie jar of a web browser, can grant substantial, unauthorized account access to the thief. This disclosure describes techniques to protect cookies by creating a web platform based isolated service for an authentication domain. The isolated service creates an ongoing measurement of the on-origin actions taken to provide an attestation that the browser session in use is the one that the server has been interacting with. The isolated service runs as part of the browser using web …

Sharing Bluetooth Accessories, Himanshu Rawat

Defensive Publications Series

This publication describes methods of generating bonding information for connecting with a Bluetooth accessory and sharing the bonding information with another Bluetooth device to enable the other Bluetooth device to autonomously connect, pair, and bond with the Bluetooth accessory. In aspects, the methods include the generation of user keys, the generation of the shared secret, establishing ownership of the Bluetooth accessory, sharing ownership of the Bluetooth accessory, sharing usage of the Bluetooth accessory, and management of users/owners of the Bluetooth accessory.

Ringtone Regardless Of P-Early-Media Tag, Chi-Wen Chung, Han-Jung Chueh, Ming-Hsien Li, Chih-He Chiang

Defensive Publications Series

A user device placing a mobile originating call on a network using Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) ignores P-Early-Media tags and session description protocol (SDP) in Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) packets received from the network after receiving a 180 Ringing alert packet indicating that the receiving device is ringing to minimize a delay in playing a ringback tone. The user device plays a local ringtone until the user device receives audio RTP packets containing Early Media. If the user device receives audio RTP packets containing Early Media before the call is connected, the user device plays the Early Media as a …

Band Scanning Reduction For Multiple Sim Standby, Edison Chen, Momo Shen, Shih-Che Chou

Defensive Publications Series

A user equipment (UE) supporting a multiple subscriber identity module (SIM) configuration employs a database to store entries representing previous band scans recently performed by the SIMs of the UE. SIMs of the UE can access the database to determine if a particular frequency band has recently been scanned by another SIM and the result of any such scan, and from this information decide whether to skip its own scan of the same frequency band, thereby saving power and time in the process.

Binding Certificates To Service Accounts Deployed On Zero-Trust Cloud Virtual Machines, Assaf Namer

Defensive Publications Series

Zero-trust architecture is based on the assumption that none of the entities within the architecture are trusted implicitly based on their properties; explicit authentication and authorization based on certificates take place prior to establishing a session with the resource. However, there is no mechanism to monitor and enforce the distribution of certificates based on cloud-based service accounts. This disclosure describes techniques to bind a certificate policy to a service account that enables enforcement of specific policies on a virtual machine based on the particular service account associated with that virtual machine. The mapping between a certificate policy and the corresponding …

Suppressing Electrical Transients Using Smart Control Of The Impedance To Ground, Benjamin Lee, Warwick Wong

Defensive Publications Series

When a device is connected to another using a cable-and-connector, e.g., a USB cable, an electrical transient can occur that can cause damage to the device or put it in an unknown state. This disclosure describes techniques to protect devices from such transient electrical spikes. The ground of the connector is coupled to the ground of the device via one of two paths, a high-impedance path or a low-impedance path. The connector-ground to device-ground coupling is mediated by a software-controlled switch, which defaults to the high-impedance path. When a cable is connected to the device, energy transfer between the connectors …

Automatic Image Redaction, Andrew Cheng

Defensive Publications Series

Large numbers of images are uploaded and shared over the internet, e.g., via email, social networks, messaging applications, image sharing applications or websites, etc. Such images can sometimes include potentially sensitive information. This disclosure describes techniques to automatically identify and redact potentially sensitive information from images or other media. A tool that implements content detection and redaction can be integrated at various points in applications that are used to share images. The redaction is under user control and can be performed at the point of capture, at the point of upload, etc. Automatic detection and user-controlled redaction of images can …

Virtual Phone Number Associated With A Physical Location, Elliott Danner Friedman

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure describes a virtual phone number that is associated with a particular location. The virtual number is in turn associated with a list of authorized devices that, when at the particular location, each receive a call placed to the virtual phone number simultaneously. Call forwarding is performed by a server that, with user permission, utilizes the device location and a geofence associated with the location to determine the devices to ring.

Techbulletin 11/2021, Ricardo Cali

Defensive Publications Series

A collection of articles of new ideas for kitchen appliances

Combined Head Gestures For Improved User Interaction, Lei Shi, Aobo Zhou

Defensive Publications Series

Fine-grained gestures such as eye gaze, facial expressions, etc., can be useful as input mechanisms for smart devices. However, single gesture inputs such as eye gaze are inefficient, and it is difficult to perform complex operations with such inputs. This disclosure describes techniques to fuse multiple head gestures, e.g., head, eye, mouth, or eyebrow movement, to provide superior user interaction. Head gestures are classified as analog (e.g., eye movements, which provide continuous input) or binary (e.g., frowns, which indicate one-time operation). An analog gesture is fused with multiple binary gestures to improve efficiency. For example, to move an object, the …

Using A Bot To Interact With Phone Menus To Reach A Human Customer Service Agent, Andrew Cheng

Defensive Publications Series

Phone menus that automate customer service operations are commonplace. Reaching a human customer service agent by interacting with such menus can be a convoluted and lengthy process that often results in the caller being stuck in circular links within the options. When a caller is successful in invoking the option to speak to a human agent, they may be put on hold and made to wait for a long time before a human agent answers. This disclosure describes a bot that, with user permission, automatically interacts with phone menus on behalf of a user and helps the user reach a …

Reliable Wireless Solution For Time-Critical Communications In Smart Utility Environments, Pascal Thubert, Huimin She, Li Zhao, Patrick Wetterwald

Defensive Publications Series

The Generic Object Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) protocol is a communication model that is defined by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61850 standard which supports the sharing of time-critical information between Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) within a substation. Due to strict requirements, GOOSE demands a fast, reliable, and deterministic network, which today is based on Ethernet networking technologies. Customers desire an alternative solution that is based on wireless radio technologies such as, for example, mesh-based networks. However, for a variety of reasons, it can be challenging to implement GOOSE over a wireless medium. Techniques are presented herein that support a …

Image And/Or Video Transformation Using Interpretable Transformation Parameters, Igor Ramos, Daniel Klein

Defensive Publications Series

A computing system and method that can be used for performing transformations of images using machine-learned model(s) and interpretable user-specified parameters that control the transformations. More specifically, the machine-learned model can be used to perform transformation(s) on an image based on different parameter(s) of a user-specified conditioning vector. The systems and methods of the present disclosure allow for a user to specify desired values for defined characteristics of a transformation (e.g., area of transformation, degree of transformation, etc.) for one or more transformations of the defined characteristic(s) (e.g., transforming lack of facial displacement distortion to presence of a facial displacement …

Reliable Normalized Customer Reviews, Alexander Ventura, Andy Lavery

Defensive Publications Series

Online reviews suffer from certain reliability problems such as lack of reviewer objectivity, reviewer bias, lack of domain familiarity on the part of the reviewer, etc. This disclosure describes techniques to improve the reliability of review scores obtained from online review facilities. A set of meta-parameters, referred to as review reliability parameters (RRP), is defined and associated with the underlying numerical rating of a review. RRPs are inputs to a machine learning model that derives a weighted review. The review of a reviewer with good RRPs is weighted more than the review of a reviewer with poor RRPs. RRPs can …

Using Xau Tokens To Count Unique Active Users Per Epoch Without Cookies, Adrian Isles

Defensive Publications Series

User engagement and adoption is typically measured in terms of the number of users active during a given period, generally termed as xAU where x stands for the measurement time interval. Without third-party cookies, it is difficult to obtain xAU measures, especially when content is embedded within other applications and services.

This disclosure describes cookieless techniques to determine a lower bound for various xAU measures. Upon receiving a request for content, a xAU token for the user agent is generated and cryptographically signed on the server and relayed to the user agent for local caching. Each xAU token can be …

Leveraging Rich Call Data To Enhance Customer Experience, Kaustubh Inamdar, Gonzalo Salgueiro, Sreekanth Narayanan

Defensive Publications Series

Secure Telephony Identity Revisited (STIR) is an effort currently being utilized to provide cryptographic assurance of caller Identity in an effort to combat robocalls and impersonation attacks. The STIR framework can be used to transport additional claims during the course of a call. These additional claims, known as Rich Call Data (RCD), may be leveraged to embed useful, context-driven information. In particular, techniques presented herein provide an overarching framework through which companies that have a technical support division can advertise a set of RCD keys that would allow callers to avoid having to navigate interactive voice response (IVR) menus, specify …

Naturalistic Routing Using Inverse Reinforcement Learning, Renaud Hartert, Matt Barnes, Matthew Abueg

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure describes techniques, referred to as naturalistic routing (NR), that improve the quality of routes found by map applications by learning from users’ real-world navigation actions, accessed with user permission. The techniques leverage the principle that users, in the aggregate, tend to travel on optimal routes to reach their destinations. A machine learning model is trained using inverse reinforcement learning and provides routes that are optimal by the users’ definition of optimality, as determined from a dataset of navigation actions.

Key-Value Store Using A Network Packet Filter Situated In The Os Kernel, Andrew C. Jackson

Defensive Publications Series

When thousands of machines coordinate a small piece of information, a network key-value store can struggle to keep up with the query load. An underlying cause of the capacity bottleneck is that the key-value store is usually held in user space, not kernel space. This disclosure leverages the run-in-kernel capabilities of a network packet filter to deliver very fast responses to key-value (hash map) requests. The network packet filter is capable of communicating with hash-map type memory accesses and can rewrite and redirect packets. When assembled this way, a packet with the query key can be returned to the requester …

Wireless Interface For Out-Of-Band Communication With Data Center Equipment, N/A

Defensive Publications Series

Organizations routinely invest in costly infrastructure such as switches and cabling to provide access to infrastructure devices like servers, network devices, storage, etc. Current management access techniques leverage local area network (LAN) on motherboard (LoM) to interconnect devices. However, LoM requires investment in additional cabling and infrastructure and can be quite costly. This disclosure describes techniques to reduce or eliminate infrastructure cabling between servers, network devices, storage, etc. Per the techniques, network interfaces to a physical cable and switch from a motherboard are supplanted or augmented with wireless connectivity options, e.g., WiFi, Bluetooth, etc.

Shoulder Tap In Ambient Video Communications, Colvin Pitts, Aaron Donsbach

Defensive Publications Series

Many virtual meeting or virtual office apps provide users with a focus zone. Avatars of users in a focus zone are visible to other participants; however, users in the focus zone are shut out from ongoing conversations in their vicinity in the virtual office. A problem arises when a first participant desires to talk to a second participant that is in a focus zone or is otherwise engaged, e.g., in a separate conversation or simply away from their desk. This disclosure describes soft-alerting techniques to gently obtain the attention of individuals in a focus zone within an ambient video communications …

Crown-Based Authentication For Smartwatches, N/A

Defensive Publications Series

At present, a smartwatch can authenticate a user by using a nearby phone controlled by the owner of the smartwatch. However, requiring a nearby phone defeats portability. Also, a watch that retains authentication for purposes of payment constitutes a security risk. This disclosure describes techniques that leverage the haptic crown of a smartwatch to enter numbers in a rotary fashion on the smartwatch screen to authenticate the user for payment or contexts where authentication is necessary. Authentication can be retained on the device until the watch is removed.

Secure Wireless Localization Using Trusted Execution Environments, Avinash Kalyanaraman, Eric Voit

Defensive Publications Series

Through wireless localization, the position of a device (user) can be computed in a world coordinate system using wireless signals. Wireless localization systems for estimating device/user location typically involve fusing measurement data obtained from multiple access points (APs) by compute end-point, such as a cloud/edge-node. Such systems, however, are prone to attacks that can be launched against a compute end-point. To address such issues, techniques herein involve running wireless localization algorithms on a new paradigm of computing involving secure enclave technology through which localization algorithms can be protected from tampering. As a result, applications that may be vulnerable to location …

System And Method For Providing Service For A Search Request, Girish Balakrishna Hegde, Priyadarshini Sarode, Rahul Powar

Defensive Publications Series

The present disclosure provides a system and a method for providing service for a search request. The proposed system receives the search request entered by a user on a browser. The proposed system adds custom header to the search request to allow index-based extraction of address of the search request. Further, the proposed system extracts the address based on the length and hashes the address. The proposed system looks into a predefined hash table and upon successful matching of the hash address from the hash table, the proposed system routes the search request to a service port and provides the …

Autosense Hood_Id-05789, Christian Mohr

Defensive Publications Series

The invention relates to a range hood system comprising a sensor module and a fan for ventilating cooking fumes. The sensor module comprises sensors for measuring air qualities. These sensors might include temperature, humidity, and TVOC/VOC (Total Volatile Organic Compounds/ Volatile Organic Compounds) sensors. The sensor module includes a microcontroller, which receives signals from those sensors. In such a system, the microcontroller executes a program to perform a set of operating modes to analyze the signals. Therein the microcontroller determines whether to switch ON/OFF state of the fan and its speed based on the analysis of the signals, e.g., comparing …

Enhanced Host Discovery In Sdn/Fabric-Based Networks, Eric Levy-Abegnoli, Pascal Thubert, Patrick Wetterwald, Ratko Kovacina

Defensive Publications Series

Various solutions are provided herein to facilitate the efficient discovery of hosts in large network environments, such as software-defined networking (SDN) or fabric-based networks, utilizing several techniques. A first technique supports the ability to efficiently manage silent ports and silent media access control (MAC) addresses. This technique involves applying a novel heuristic to ports and MAC addresses, classifying such entities (as silent, quiet, and noisy), and intelligently polling such entities. A second technique supports a Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD)-based host discovery approach that is applicable to Internet Protocol (IP) version 4 (IPv4) and involves a host creating an IP version …

A System And Method For Providing Multiple Transactions For A Single Payment, Samuel Oliver Mr

Defensive Publications Series

Present disclosure provides a system and method for providing multiple transactions by tapping multiple cards consecutively on a Point of Sale (PoS) device (104) for a single payment. The system may include a PoS device (104) and a network server (109). The PoS device (104) receives merchant input for a payment. The merchant (102) input includes total transaction amount and payment split input into the PoS device (104). The payment split input indicates the total number of customers who desire to divide the total transaction amount within themselves. The PoS device (104) splits the total amount by the number input …

Off-Process Gui Rendering, Roberto Perez, Babak Bostan, Jorge Pereira, Madan Ankapura, Rasekh Rifaat, Jay Yoo, Eric Bahna, Ozge Kirimlioglu, Dean Harding, Rafael Lima

Defensive Publications Series

An application may offload rendering of a graphical user interface (GUI) to an underlying operating system executing at a head unit (e.g., an infotainment system) of a vehicle (e.g., automobile, motorcycle, a bus, a recreational vehicle (RV), a semi-trailer truck, a tractor or other type of farm equipment, a train, a plane, a helicopter, etc.) or a computing device (e.g., a cellular phone, a smartphone, a desktop computer, a laptop computer, a tablet computer, a portable gaming device, a watch, etc.). The application may invoke functions of an application library that allow the application to generate GUI metadata including a …

Network Sandbox For Closed-Source Components With Access To Sensitive Data, Eugenio Marchiori, Sergey Volnov, Thomas Hume Weedon, Wei Huang, Asela Jeevaka Ranaweera Gunawardana

Defensive Publications Series

A computing device (e.g., a smartphone, a laptop computer, a tablet computer, a smartwatch, etc.) may include a system application for managing both the ability of software (e.g., an application, a program, a widget, etc.) to access a network and the type of information that can be transmitted to a computing system via the network. Rather than use a permission-based model (e.g., a model in which a user manually permits an application to access the network), which may grant the application unconstrained network access, the system application may use a dataflow model (e.g., a model in which a framework defines …