Information Protection and Authentication of Texas (IPAT) has filed a patent infringement suit against 22 companies—including Microsoft, Symantec, CA, F-Secure, McAfee, Kaspersky, Sophos, Novell, and PC Tools—for infringing on a pair of patents issued in the mid-1990s regarding applications security and integrity. The first patent cited, 5,311,591, involves a method for authorizing what resources on a computer a particular application program can use; the second patent, 5,412,717, involves using hashes—essentially, unique mathematical identifiers—to confirm that a program hasn’t been tampered with on disk or in memory.
Digital Trends
