NCR Alleos Assigned Patent

NCR Alleos Corporation, Atlanta, GA, has been assigned a patent (12058256) developed by Roper; Anthony Edward, Archibald; Kerry E., and Ghafoor; Gameelah, Dundee, Great Britain, for “system and method for providing a secure locally-based boot disk encryption key.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A system and method for operating a terminal such as an automated teller machine or other type of self-service terminal having a primary partition of a hard disk encrypted with a disk encryption key (DEK). At the initial installation and after every boot, a pre-boot manager encrypts the DEK with a new key encryption key (KEK) and then splits the encrypted DEK into a plurality of encrypted DEK parts. The pre-boot manager next stores the plurality of encrypted DEK parts in randomized storage locations on an unallocated portion of a hard disk and encrypts a list of the randomized storage locations of the plurality of encrypted DEK parts with the KEK and storing the encrypted list in a location on the unallocated portion of the hard disk. Finally, the pre-boot manager stores the KEK, optionally in an obfuscated format, in a location on the unallocated portion of the hard disk.”

The patent application was filed on 2022-02-15 (17/671729).