International Business Machines Corporation

Bryan Douglas Dobbs

Michael Richard Cooper

Mark Wayne VanderWiele

Ravi Ravisankar

Karen Lynn Buros

Ann Mizell Robinson

Robert James Knaus

A method and system for certificating and authenticating an identity of a customer of a financial institution using digital certificates is provided. The customer and the financial institution communicate via a communications medium. The financial institution receives a digital registration request from the customer and verifies the identity of the customer by reconciling identification data in the digital registration request with identification data in a customer data structure at the financial institution. Responsive to verifying the identity of the customer, the financial institution generates a digital certificate and sends the digital certificate to the customer. When the customer desires access to an on-line application at the financial institution, the customer sends the previously issued digital certificate to the financial institution via the communications link. The financial institution authenticates the digital certificate and grants on-line application access based upon the authenticated digital certificate. The digital certificate may be suspended without being revoked by associatively storing certificate-state information with the distinguished name of the certificate owner, thereby providing a mechanism for suspending and resuming access privileges of the customer.

System and method for suspending and resuming digital certificates in a certificate-based user authentication application system

The present invention is directed to a system and method of managing logical device state information within an information handling system. Logical device state information is stored only once, by the information handling system. Device drivers do not need to maintain and store redundant copies of logical device state information. A device driver indicates whether or not it needs to have logical device state information passed to it. Before calling a device driver to handle a device function, the information handling system checks to determine whether or not the device driver has indicated that it needs logical device state information passed to it. If so, the information handling system passes the appropriate logical device state information to the device driver. For device functions which are not hooked by the device driver, the information handling system maintains the device state. System efficiency is increased, as each device driver may register for the subset of functions it can most efficiently handle, without hooking operating system functions or handling all state specific functions associated with a particular device function. In addition, device driver development may proceed in an incremental fashion, and device driver developers do not have to learn details of every operating system on which a device may be installed.

System and method for managing device driver logical state information in an information handling system

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Austin, TX, United States of America

Bryan Douglas Dobbs