Recent Patents in Signal Processing (March 2013) - Encrypted-domain Signal Processing

For our February 2013 issue, we focus on recent patents in signal processing in the encrypted domain. The selection below contains patents issued in the recent past in various applications of secure signal processing. These include advances in private keyword search, privacy-preserving classifier design, secure computation of polynomial functions, secure auctions, and more. Readers interested in finding out more about this interesting topic are referred to the March 2013 Special Issue of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, which covers various aspects of encrypted-domain signal processing.

US 8,375,030, "Differentially private aggregate classifier for multiple databases", by S. Rane, M. Pathak and B. Ramakrishnan, filed 3 December 2010, issued 12 February 2013, assigned to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. (Cambridge, MA).

US 8,291,237, "Method for private keyword search on streaming data", by R. Ostrovsky and W. Skeith III, filed 28 February 2006, issued 16 October 2012, assigned to The Regents of the University of California (Oakland, CA).

US 8,281,148, "Securely computing a similarity measure", by P. Tuyls, E. Verbitskiy, B. Schoenmakers and M. Van Dijk, filed 9 November 2005, issued 2 October 2012, assigned to Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. (Eindhoven, Netherlands).

US 8,150,041, "Secure computation of private values", by F. Kerschbaum, filed 6 December 2010, issued 3 April 2012, assigned to SAP AG (Walldorf, Germany).

US 7,937,270, "System and method for recognizing speech securely using a secure multi-party computation protocol", by P. Smaragdis and M. Shashanka, filed 16 January 2007, issued 3 May 2011, assigned to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. (Cambridge, MA).

US 7,986,780, "Privacy-preserving substring creation", by F. Kerschbaum and L. M. S. de Souza, filed 6 July 2006, issued 26 July 2011, assigned to SAP AG (Walldorf, Germany).

US 8,024,274, "Practical secrecy-preserving, verifiably correct and trustworthy auctions" by D. Parkes, M. Rabin, S. Shieber and C. Thorpe, filed 7 May 2007, issued 20 September 2011, assigned to President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA).

US 8,229,939, "Server-implemented system and method for providing private inference control", by J. Staddon and D. Woodruff, filed 29 December 2008, issued 24 July 2011, assigned to Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated (Palo Alto, CA) .

US 8,209,531, "Revocation of cryptographic digital certificates", by C. Gentry, Z. Ramzan and B. Bruhn, filed 26 June 2009, issued 26 June 2012, assigned to NTT DoCoMo, Inc. (Tokyo, JP).

US 8,281,121, "Private aggregation of distributed time-series data", by S. Nath and V. Rastogi, filed 13 May 2010, issued 2 October 2012, assigned to Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA).

If you have an interesting patent to share when we next feature patents related to signal processing in the encrypted domain, or if you are especially interested in a signal processing research field that you would want to be highlighted in this section, please send email to Shantanu Rane (rane AT merl DOT com).