State University of New York Assigned Patent

Research Foundation for the State University of New York, Binghamton, NY, has been assigned a patent (8,862,900) developed by Yu Chen, Vestal, NY, for a “secure distributed storage system and method.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “Moving from server-attached storage to distributed storage brings new vulnerabilities in creating a secure data storage and access facility. The Data Division and Out-of-order keystream Generation technique provides a cryptographic method to protect data in the distributed storage environments. In the technique, the Treating the data as a binary bit stream, our self-encryption (SE) scheme generates a keystream by randomly extracting bits from the stream. The length of the keystream depends on the user’s security requirements. The bit stream is encrypted and the ciphertext is stored on the mobile device, whereas the keystream is stored separately. This makes it computationally not feasible to recover the original data stream from the ciphertext alone.”

The patent application was filed on Jan. 6, 2011 (12/985,488).