IBM Assigned Patent

IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, has been assigned a patent (8,218,763) developed by John G. Rooney, Biot, France, for a "method for ensuring the validity of recovered electronic documents from remote storage."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A method for electronically storing and retrieving at a later date a true copy of a document stored on a remote storage device comprises: sending a document in electronic format from a document owner’s computing device to a store entity for storing the document; generating a digest of the document while the document is at the store entity by applying a hash function to the document; signing the digest electronically with a key while said document is at the store entity; generating a receipt that includes the digest and the key; sending the receipt to the document owner; and verifying, at the document owner’s computing device, that the received receipt corresponds to the document sent from the owner’s computing device."

The patent application was filed on April 12, 2009 (12/427,963).