Alcatel Lucent

Cloakware Corporation

Irdeto Canada Corporation

Northern Telecom Limited

Cloakare Corporation

Stanley T Chow

Harold J Johnson

Christophe Gustave

Bassem Abdel-Aziz

Yuan X Gu

Shu-Lin Chen

Douglas Wiemer

Alexander James Main

Yuan Xiang Gu

Peter Mark Rabinovitch

Vinod Choyi

Dmitri Vinokurov

Faud Ahmad Khan

Bradley Kenneth McFarlane

Jeff Smith

Jean-Marc Robert

Bharat Kumar

Yongxin Zhou

Kevin McNamee

Louie Kwan

Philip A Eisen

Brad McFarlane

Mohammed Riyas Valiyapalathingal

Jennifer Li

Alexander Shokurov

Becky Laiping Chang

Various exemplary embodiments relate to a method and related network element including one or more of the following: receiving a plurality of advertisement messages via the communications network, each advertisement message of the plurality of advertisement messages including a set of meta-information which describes the content of an advertisement associated with the advertisement message; determining whether each advertisement message is relevant to the user by comparing the set of meta-information to a set of user preferences associated with the user, the set of user preferences stored locally on the user node; when an advertisement message is determined to not be relevant to the user, discarding the advertisement message; and when an advertisement message is determined to be relevant to the user, providing the user with access to the advertisement associated with the advertisement message.

Privacy-counscious advertising

Methods and systems are presented for detection of malware such as worms in which a network switch entices the malware into sending scan packets by allocating one or more ports as bait addresses, sending outgoing bait packets, and identifying compromised hosts that send unexpected incoming packets to a bait address.

Malware detection system and method

Caller name is authenticated using authentication certificates issued by a registration authority that registers callers who wish to terminate calls to callers subscribed to the registration authority. In one embodiment, the authentication certificates are sent to a called device or a proxy for the called device via a path that is separate from the call setup path. An indication is conveyed to the called party to indicate whether the caller name was successfully authenticated.

Caller name authentication to prevent caller identity spoofing

Security vulnerability information aggregation techniques are disclosed. Vulnerability information associated with one or more security vulnerabilities is obtained from multiple sources and aggregated into respective unified vulnerability definitions for the one or more security vulnerabilities. Aggregation may involve format conversion, content aggregation, or both in some embodiments. Unified vulnerability definitions may be distributed to vulnerability information consumers in accordance with consumer-specific policies. Storage of vulnerability information received from the sources may allow the aggregation process to be performed on existing vulnerability information 'retro-actively'. Related data structures and Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are also disclosed.

Security vulnerability information aggregation

A method includes receiving an authentication certificate of a voice mail account holder and/or an authentication certificate of a caller wanting to leave a voice mail message the holders' voice mail account. A voice mail apparatus that provides voice mail service for the voice mail account holder performs such receiving. The account holder and/or the caller are authenticated after receiving the authentication certificate of the party being authenticated. Authenticating the account holder and/or the caller is performed using authentication information contained within the respective certificate. After such authentication is successfully performed, a voice mail message record can be created in the account of the account holder. Such creating includes allowing the caller to store the message in the account of the account holder in addition to associating authenticated identification information of the caller with the message and/or providing authenticated identification of the account holder to the caller.

Verifying authenticity of voice mail participants in telephony networks

Attacks by computer viruses, worm programs, and other hostile software ('malware'), have become very serious problems for computer systems connected to large communication networks such as the Internet. One potential defense against such attacks is to employ diversity&#x2014;that is, making each copy of the attacked software different. However, existing diversity techniques do not offer sufficient levels of protection. The invention provides an effective diversity solution by applying tamper resistant software (TRS) encoding techniques, to the communications that take place between software components, with corresponding changes to the code handling those communications. These communications may include, for example, data passed between software routines via parameters or mutually accessible variables, light-weight messages, signals and semaphores passed between threads, and messages passed between software processes. Effective TRS encoding techniques include data-flow encoding and mass-data encoding techniques.

Secure method and system for computer protection

Information system service-level security risk analysis systems, methods, and Graphical User Interfaces are disclosed. Assets of an information system that have relationships with a service provided by the information system are identified, and at least one security risk to the service is determined by analyzing security vulnerabilities associated with the identified assets. A consolidated representation of the service is provided, and includes an indication of the determined security risk(s) and an indication of a relationship between the service and at least one of the identified assets. The security risk indication may include indications of multiple security parameters. Security risks may be represented differently depending on whether they arise from a security vulnerability of an asset that has a relationship with the service or a security vulnerability of an asset that has a relationship with the service only through a relationship with an asset that has a relationship with the service.

Information system service-level security risk analysis

Malware detection systems are presented in which a list is constructed of enterprise hosts to or from which each given enterprise network host sends or receives packets within a current measurement period and statistics are accumulated based on two or more measurement period lists, with a count value being derived from the statistics to indicate the number of other hosts to or from which each monitored host sent or received packets, and one or more monitored hosts may be identified as suspected of being infected with slow and/or distributed scanning malware for which the count value exceeds a threshold value.

Method and system for identifying enterprise network hosts infected with slow and/or distributed scanning malware

Transparent caller name authentication is provided to authorized third parties by creating an Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) certificate chain. An owner of a registered caller name can authorize third parties to use the caller name by issuing a PKI sub-certificate to each authorized third party. An authenticated caller name displays the owner's name to the called party. Outsourcing and mobile employment is thereby facilitated, and called party confusion is reduced.

Transparent caller name authentication for authorized third party callers

A method of automatically aggregating an online user community, and graphical user interface for same, the method including one or more of the following: a user creating the online community; the user defining an aggregation policy for the online user community; a service provider retrieving the aggregation policy; the service provider applying the aggregation policy to an other user; determining whether the other user fits the aggregation policy; adding the other user to the online user community; the user defining an anti-aggregation policy; the service provider retrieving the anti-aggregation policy; determining whether the other user fits the anti-aggregation policy; and removing the other user from the online user community when the other user fits the anti-aggregation policy.

Policy-enabled aggregation of IM user communities

Malware detection systems and methods are presented in which header data of protocol data units (PDUs) are examined at a wireless access switch shared by multiple clients, and the PDU type and client are used to establish counters, with the count values being analyzed to identify clients suspected of being infected with malware.

Malware detection methods and systems for multiple users sharing common access switch

Graph-based modeling apparatus and techniques are disclosed. Based on a model including model nodes that represent components of a modeled system, operational dependencies between model nodes, and model edges that interconnect the nodes and represent relationships between the components in the modeled system, subset computations are performed to compute subsets of the model nodes that can impact operational dependencies between other model nodes. When the model changes, a determination is made as to whether an incremental subset computation should be performed for one or more particular operational dependencies between model nodes in the changed model, and if so, an incremental subset computation is performed. Otherwise, a full subset computation or no subset computation might be performed. In this manner, model changes are considered on a case-by-case basis to determine an extent, if any, to which subsets should be re-computed.

Graph-based modeling apparatus and techniques

A method for authenticating an operator of an AP includes: registering the operator's identity with a CA, by providing the operator's identification information and public key; creating a certificate including the foregoing; signing the certificate with the CA's private key; provisioning the AP with the signed certificate; provisioning a client with the CA's public key; sending a request from the client to the AP; generating a signature with the operator's private key; returning a reply to the client, including the AP provisioned certificate signed with the generated signature; using the client provisioned CA's public key to obtain the operator's public key from the certificate received in the reply; and, using the operator's public key obtained from the certificate received in the reply to verify the signature generated with the operator's private key and used by the AP to sign the certificate received in the reply.

Authentication of access points in wireless local area networks

A method of detecting malware may include: a) examining header data in each PDU transferred by a port of an access switch to identify PDUs transferred from a local network device, b) extracting a far-end device address for PDUs based at least in part on examination of an address portion of the corresponding header data, c) maintaining fan-out information indicative of a quantity of unique far-end device addresses extracted from the PDUs during consecutive time windows, d) determining a current trend based on the fan-out information for a current time window, e) comparing the current trend to an expected trend, and f) identifying a suspected malware infection in the local network device when the current trend exceeds the expected trend by a trend threshold. A network element that may implement the method may include a header data processing unit, data storage logic, data processing logic, and malware identification logic.

Growing community of inventors

Nepean, Canada

Stanley T Chow