As per patent office journal dated 03/09/2021, patent number 375522 has been granted to TELEFONAKTIEBOLAGET L M ERICSSON (PUBL)which is titled ACENTRALIZED KEY MANAGEMENT IN EMBMS
The primary independent claim of this patent states a method of generating a Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service, MBMS, Traffic Key, MTK, at a Broadcast Multicast Service Center, BMSC wherein the method includes receiving a MBMS Service Key, MSK , corresponding to an MSK generated at a centralized key management service and generating the MTK for use in encrypting content transmitted towards a user equipment node, UE as a function of at least the received MSK.
During the patent prosecution, the patent examiner objected to this patent under section 3(k) of the Indian Patents Act. The patent applicant responded to this objection by stating that if the present invention provides a technical solution to a technical problem and has a technical effect then the same cannot be considered to fall under the category of algorithm or computer program per se. In light of such observation, the technical problem was formulated as how to distribute the MTKs and MSKs in large-scale MBMS deployments (i.e. split eMBMS) while keeping the key distribution traffic as low as possible. The technical solution provided by the claimed invention focuses on a method of generating a Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service, MBMS, Traffic Key, MTK, at a Broadcast Multicast Service Center, BMSC by receiving a MBMS Service Key, MSK, corresponding to an MSK generated at a centralized key management service and generating the MTK for use in encrypting content transmitted towards a user equipment node, UE, as a function of at least the received MSK. In addition, the claimed invention provides the technical effect that both the MSKs and the MTKs are synchronized across multiple BMSCs, because the MSKs originate from a centralized key management service and the MTKs are derived from the MSKs. The centralized key management service only needs to distribute the MSKs to the BMSCs, wherein the MSKs need not to be updated very often in comparison to the MTKs. Therefore, the claims of the present invention do not fall within the scope of Section 3(k) of the Act.
This patent falls under the category of Computer Science. Overall, this patent covers a split architecture eMBMS with distributed BMSCs providing the same eMBMS service allows for a centralized key service where each BMSC is able to derive a set of MTKs from the MSK using the MTK-IDs as the differentiating input. This avoids the need to send MTKs to the BMSCs.
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