| Patent application number | Description | Published |
| 20090193511 | TWO-FACTOR USB AUTHENTICATION TOKEN - The present patent application discloses a USB token that advantageously mimics a human interface device such as a keyboard in interacting with a host computer, thus removing the need for pre-installation of a dedicated device driver. This is accomplished by requiring the host computer to direct the input of the attached human interface devices of the keyboard type, including the USB token, exclusively to the program interacting with the USB token, by using cryptographic algorithms based on a shared secret, which require less data to be transferred than PKI-based algorithms, and by employing an efficient encoding scheme that minimizes the time needed to exchange information with the USB token, and minimizes the probability of generating ambiguity with input that might legitimately be generated by other attached human interface devices. By using only symmetric encryption and the low-speed USB protocol, a single low-performance processor may be used, which results in a more cost-effective solution than PKI USB tokens emulating the combination of smart cards and smart card readers or USB tokens presenting themselves to the host computer as mass storage devices. The overall security is increased by adding a second authentication factor consisting of a static password entered by the user, and by limiting the number of valid token response that can be generated or retrieved in a usage session. | 07-30-2009 |
| 20090232515 | METHOD AND AN APPARATUS TO CONVERT A LIGHT SIGNAL EMITTED BY A DISPLAY INTO DIGITAL SIGNALS - The present invention provides a method and a device to convert a time varying optical pattern emitted by a display into a digital data signal. More specifically the invention allows a handheld security token to convert a time-varying light intensity pattern emitted by a source such as a computer screen into a digital signal including a sequence of coded data symbols. The invention is based on the insight that the intensity of light emitted by regions of said source can be easily sampled by a simple low-cost processor if appropriate A/D conversion hardware converts the incident light into an electrical signal which is time varying, whereby the base frequency of this electrical signal is a function of the light intensity. Intensity levels used for channel coding and symbol clock can be recovered from the signal by the receiver. The invention comprises measuring this electrical signal, transforming sets of measurements into intensity samples for a plurality of sampling windows, adaptively calculating discrete intensity levels from these intensity samples, assigning intensity levels to the sampling windows, detecting symbol period boundaries, and decoding the symbols. | 09-17-2009 |
| 20090322766 | Method for transmission of a digital message from a display to a handheld receiver - The invention relates to a method to efficiently transmit a digital message over a unidirectional optical link, such as the link between a computer screen and a security token equipped with photosensitive elements. It is an object of this invention to provide a source coding scheme that is optimized for transmissions of alphanumerical data containing frequent occurrences of numerals and less frequent occurrences of non-numerical data. This is achieved by using a modified Huffman code for source coding, consisting of a nibble-based prefix-free binary code. The output of the coder is efficiently mapped onto a 6B4T channel code, wherein unused ternary codewords can be used to signal data-link layer events. This efficient signalling of data-link layer events, in turn, allows for a synchronization scheme based on repeated transmissions of a finite-length message, combined with an out-of-band clock signal. | 12-31-2009 |
| 20110007846 | Modulation and Demodulation Circuit - The invention relates to the field of modulation and demodulation circuits, such as envelope detectors used to demodulate amplitude-modulated (AM) signals and amplitude-shift-keying (ASK) signals. By judiciously coupling an analog circuit comprising one resistor and two capacitors which are judiciously dimensioned to a port of a digital component, an extremely compact envelope detector can be obtained, which achieves demodulation of a binary ASK signal for direct coupling into a digital input port. Accordingly, a very compact envelope detector may advantageously be used in the data receiving part of a sealed device requiring post-manufacturing data transfer, in combination with additional components that provide electromagnetic coupling, such as inductive coupling, capacitive coupling, or radiative coupling. An example of such a device is a credit card sized authentication token, the electrical personalization of which happens after the production of the card-like housing. The digital port may additionally be used to modulate the backscattered wave, by switching the voltage of the diode port to the system ground level. In this way, the apparatus is advantageously equipped with a wireless bidirectional half-duplex transmission system. | 01-13-2011 |
| 20110099377 | COMPACT SECURITY DEVICE WITH TRANSACTION RISK LEVEL APPROVAL CAPABILITY - The present invention relates to the field of securing electronic transactions and more specifically to methods to indicate and verify the approval of the risk level of a transaction and to apparatuses for generating transaction risk level approval codes. | 04-28-2011 |
| 20110099384 | STRONG AUTHENTICATION TOKEN USABLE WITH A PLURALITY OF INDEPENDENT APPLICATION PROVIDERS - The present invention defines a strong authentication token for generating different dynamic credentials for different application providers comprising an input interface providing an output representing an application provider indicator; a secret key storage for storing one or more secret keys; a variability source for providing a dynamic variable value; a key providing agent for providing an application provider specific key as a function of said application provider indicator using one or more keys stored in said secret key storage; a cryptographic agent for cryptographically combining said application provider specific key with said dynamic variable value using symmetric cryptography; a transformation agent coupled to said cryptographic agent for transforming an output of said cryptographic agent to produce a dynamic credential; and an output interface to output said dynamic credential. | 04-28-2011 |
| Patent application number | Description | Published |
| 20090307652 | AUTOMATIC MODEL-SPECIFIC DEBUGGER EXTENSIONS - Extensions to a debugger are identified in a debugger database which is read automatically when the debugger loads. The debugger watches for trigger events in its execution environment and optionally for load conditions in a debuggee program's internal state. If a trigger event occurs and a load condition is met, then the debugger automatically loads an extension for use. Some extensions provide debugging routines that are specifically designed to support debugging of applications which use a specific programming model. | 12-10-2009 |
| 20090307663 | DEBUGGING SUPPORT FOR TASKS IN MULTITHREADED ENVIRONMENTS - A debugger enhancement provides a debug-task-provider interface whose implementation includes routines designed to support debugging of programs that contain tasks written for a specific programming model. Task creation hierarchies, individual task properties, resource dependencies, synchronization dependencies, and other information can be made accessible during debugging, through a model-independent interface. In a multithreaded environment, a mapping between tasks and threads is also available. | 12-10-2009 |
| 20100235815 | SIMULTANEOUSLY DISPLAYING MULTIPLE CALL STACKS IN AN INTERACTIVE DEBUGGER - Visual representations of multiple call stacks in a parallel programming system include a stack segments graph constructed by coalescing data from multiple stacks. The graph has nodes that represent stack segments and has arcs between adjacent segments. Similar stack frames are represented by the same node. In a stack prefix view of the graph, arcs are directed from a node representing stack frames to a node representing subsequently executed stack frames. In a method-centered view, an arc is shown between a node representing stack frames of a selected method and a node representing adjacent stack frames. The graph can be based on call stacks of all tasks or all threads, or based on call stacks of tasks or threads flagged by a user. Stack frame, thread, and/or task details are also displayed. | 09-16-2010 |