Washington State University Assigned Patent

Washington State University, Pullman, WA,has been assigned a patent (9,049,011) developed by Agrawal, Punit, Seattle, WA, for a “secure key storage and distribution.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”This disclosure describes a distributed, fault-tolerant security system that enables the secure storage and distribution of private keys. In one implementation, the security system includes a plurality of computing resources that independently store private keys provided by publishers and encrypted using a single security system public key. To protect against malicious activity, the security system private key necessary to decrypt the publication private keys is not stored at any of the computing resources. Rather portions, or shares of the security system private key are stored at each of the computing resources within the security system and multiple security systems must communicate and share partial decryptions in order to decrypt the stored private key.“

The patent application was filed on August 14, 2013 (13/967,029).