By: Brian Ragan, SecurityWeek
Kaspersky Lab, the only security vendor to fight a patent lawsuit filed by IPAT (Information Protection and Authentication of Texas), officially announced last week that they were victorious following a three-year court battle. IPAT filed a patent suit in 2009, targeting nearly every security vendor in the industry. The lawsuit claimed violation of patents 5,311,591 and 5,412,717, which were issued almost a year apart to the day in 1994 and 1995.
Each patent covers what is essentially sandboxing: "...method and apparatus are disclosed including a system monitor which limits the ability of a program about to be executed to the use of predefined resources (e.g., data files, disk writing capabilities, etc.). The system monitor processes a data structure including a set of authorities defining that which a program is permitted to do and/or that which the program is precluded from doing…"
