United States of America/Secretary of the Navy Assigned Patent

The United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Navy, Washington, DC, has been assigned a patent (10,642,984) developed by Heagney, Christopher, Jacksonville, FL, for “secure drive and method for booting to known good-state.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”An apparatus and method of a secure drive is provided. The system includes a gate array, a non-volatile memory drive, and a power source. The non-volatile memory drive has secure, operational, and persistent memory spaces. The secure memory space is programmed with an encryption key and an encrypted disk image. In response to a power cycle, the gate array reads the encrypted disk image from the secure memory, authenticates the disk image using the encryption key, decrypts the encrypted disk image, and writes the decrypted disk image to the operational memory. The decrypted disk image is used to boot a computer. The computer is booted to a known good state each time the power is cycled.”

The patent application was filed on June 12, 2018 (16/006,185).