Texan firm sues whole security world

Swathe of major security providers cited in patent infringement case.

A small Texan firm has taken on the mightiest corporations from across the security and anti-malware industry, launching a patent infringement suit against most of the major players in the field.

The company, Information Protection and Authentication of Texas LLC (IPAT), holds a pair of US patents dating from the mid-1990s which it alleges are being infringed by Symantec, McAfee, Microsoft, Sophos, AVG, Trend Micro, ESET, Norman, Check Point, CA, Kaspersky, Sunbelt, Iolo, PC Tools, Webroot and Novell, among others.

The patents appear to cover technologies controlling the behaviour of software by restricting access to data and other software, including standard operating systems such as writing to disk, based on lists of allowed and banned activities associated with the software in question. In effect, this would cover most of the technologies used in the wide range of behaviour-based anti-malware protection systems.

Official documents related to the case are online here, with a PDF of the complaint itself here. The two patents in question can be viewed here and here.

06 January 2009

Tags: behaviour blocking, legal, patent. del.icio.us digg this