|Numéro de publication||US7480935 B2|
|Type de publication||Octroi|
|Numéro de demande||US 10/681,613|
|Date de publication||20 janv. 2009|
|Date de dépôt||8 oct. 2003|
|Date de priorité||10 oct. 2002|
|État de paiement des frais||Caduc|
|Autre référence de publication||US7904948, US20040117430, US20090094454|
|Numéro de publication||10681613, 681613, US 7480935 B2, US 7480935B2, US-B2-7480935, US7480935 B2, US7480935B2|
|Inventeurs||Philippe Bazot, Fabrice Livigni, Jacques Cresp, Richard Sert|
|Cessionnaire d'origine||International Business Machines Corporation|
|Exporter la citation||BiBTeX, EndNote, RefMan|
|Citations de brevets (17), Citations hors brevets (1), Référencé par (6), Classifications (20), Événements juridiques (4)|
|Liens externes: USPTO, Cession USPTO, Espacenet|
The present invention relates generally to the identification protection of a subscriber of a distributed network environment, such as the Internet, and more specifically to a method for securely and anonymously transferring subscriber identification between service and content providers.
The service provider (SP) market has moved up the value chain from pure connectivity services to deliver value-added and revenue generating services. The business model of a service provider, which was initially driven by minutes of use, is being increasingly replaced by data traffic generated by users that access external services through an increasing variety of devices. In addition to growing their customer bases, service providers are now looking to increase the average revenue per user to boost revenues. More compelling services such as content, commerce, and applications promise higher profit margins, improved customer retention, and greater customer satisfaction. However, managing and distributing these third-party content services present significant challenges to service providers.
At the same time, content providers (CPs) are quickly becoming experts in digitally managing and distributing their content, but still face the challenge of establishing independent relationships with end users. To successfully generate revenue through digital content assets, both service and content providers need a solution that leverages their complementary strengths while protecting their respective assets.
In this context, emerging Web Services technologies will play a key role in the management of the Business to Business (B2B) relationship between the SPs and CPs. As the Web did for program-to-user interactions, Web Services will do for program-to-program interactions. Web Services allow companies to reduce the cost of doing e-business, to deploy solutions faster, and to open up new opportunities. The key to reaching this new horizon is a common program-to-program communications model, built on existing and emerging standards such as HTTP, extensible Markup Language (XML), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI). Web Services allow applications to be integrated more rapidly, easily, and less expensively than ever before. They provide a unifying programming model so that application integration inside and outside the enterprise can be done with a common approach.
In today's market, a service provider generally aggregates content from multiple content providers and therefore multiplies its partnerships with CPs. In order to ease integration with these different CPs, the SP delegates an increasing number of authentication and authorization tasks to the CPs.
These tasks could be done in different ways:
Thus, it is a broad object of the invention to remedy the shortcomings of the prior art as described above.
It is another object of the invention to provide a method adapted to protect service provider subscriber registries.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a method that do not require content providers to build and maintain their own subscriber registries.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a method adapted to protect user privacy when a user obtains content other than that provided by the user's service provider.
It is still a further object of the invention to provide a method adapted to prevent subscribers from having to enroll with every external content provider, and to prevent subscribers from having to provide personal and/or sensitive information to content providers that may be considered as not trustworthy.
It is still a further object of the invention to provide a method adapted to supply a Web Services based mechanism to allow content providers to validate a subscriber's identity prior to downloading content to that subscriber.
The accomplishment of these and other related objects is achieved by a computerized method for protecting an identifier of a subscriber during data transfer between a service provider and a content provider when said subscriber sends a request to said service provider to obtain data belonging to said content provider, said computerized method comprising executing on at least one computer the steps including:
Further advantages of the present invention will become apparent to the ones skilled in the art upon examination of the drawings and detailed description. It is intended that any additional advantages be incorporated herein.
According to the invention, CPs use the SP's user registry to prevent the end-user from having to enroll (or to be enrolled by batch process for instance) several times with different CPs, in order to be authorized to download content from their sites. This drastically reduces the cost of the business process on the CP side.
However, since CPs need to make sure of the subscription and of the authorization of the end-user requesting specific content towards the SP platforms, a user identifier, referred to as a user Id in the following description, must be transferred and shared in the communication process between the CPs and the SPs. For that purpose, the end-user can be assigned an identification symbol, statically or dynamically.
Static assignment allows CPs to perform some statistical and user behavior analysis, such as “The user X accesses the application on a daily basis between 9:00 and 10:00.” Static assignment is easier to handle, but it will not prevent user analysis. However, it can prevent a user's behavior from being correlated to the actual user. Dynamic assignment prevents user analysis, and therefore adds additional security to the SP subscriber registry because it completely ensures end-users privacy by preventing the content provider from generating statistical information about subscriber interests. As a consequence, a preferred embodiment of the invention is based on dynamic assignment.
The invention provides a scaleable and secure solution for sharing trustable subscriber identification between a SP and a CP, thus providing the necessary base for a revenue sharing business model. The solution is based on the generation and transmission of an anonymous subscriber token with every request, such as HTTP requests, going to external services managed by the SP, and a mechanism, installed and maintained on the SP side, to allow a CP to validate the subscriber token prior to downloading valuable content.
The invention provides a secure method that allows a SP to deploy a common architecture to integrate CPs more rapidly, easily and less expensively than before:
This overall mechanism guarantees 100% privacy of end-users regarding the CPs making each request anonymous and at the same time, allows the SP to control the validity of user information sent by the CP by using standard key encryption (symmetric or asymmetric key).
End-user 100 may access an application of the service provider or an external service through a proxy 120, to obtain personalized content, e.g., news or a weather forecast, retrieved by the SP from a CP partner. The service provider platform 105 checks in its user registry 125 if the end-user 100 requesting such a service is “known” and has the authorization to obtain the requested data. A user management session 130 could be done at this point in the service provider platform 105 to prevent user registry access for each subsequent request.
Once the user has been authorized by the SP to access the requested external service, and before sending the request to the content provider platform, the SP generates an encrypted token from the user Id retrieved in the SP user registry 125 (user Id is a symbol that will uniquely identify the end-user 100) using an user anonymization mechanism 135 based on a standard key encryption algorithm. The algorithm used to generate an encrypted token is detailed by reference to
The CP uses a handler 140 and an authentication Web Service (WebSCP) 145 provided by the service provider through a request, e.g. a SOAP request. The CP has the responsibility to transfer the encrypted token as requested by the published Web Service interface. The encrypted token could be passed directly in the SOAP body or alternatively in a predefined SOAP header. The SOAP request could be securely transferred by using secure SOAP protocols. Before being processed by the Web Service endpoint, the SOAP request is intercepted by a SOAP handler 140, whose role is to decrypt the encrypted token using the appropriate key and to extract the user Id (the algorithm is described by reference to
Depending on the response status, the appropriate content extracted from the content provider platform storage 150 or an error message, is sent to the SP application or proxy 120 so as to be transmitted to the end-user 100, depending upon the CP response.
As described above, extraction (step 250) and decryption (step 255) of the encrypted token are performed by handler 140, while certification (step 260) and other tasks such as billing are performed by the authentication Web Service 145 that transmits back the response (step 265) or, if required, an acknowledgment.
Now turning to
Thus, the method of the invention provides:
Naturally, in order to satisfy local and specific requirements, a person skilled in the art may apply to the solution described above many modifications and alterations all of which, however, are included within the scope of protection of the invention as defined by the following claims.
|Brevet cité||Date de dépôt||Date de publication||Déposant||Titre|
|US5646998 *||22 mai 1995||8 juil. 1997||Stambler; Leon||Secure transaction system and method utilized therein|
|US5796841 *||21 août 1995||18 août 1998||Pitney Bowes Inc.||Secure user certification for electronic commerce employing value metering system|
|US5825881 *||28 juin 1996||20 oct. 1998||Allsoft Distributing Inc.||Public network merchandising system|
|US5850442 *||26 mars 1996||15 déc. 1998||Entegrity Solutions Corporation||Secure world wide electronic commerce over an open network|
|US5903878 *||20 août 1997||11 mai 1999||Talati; Kirit K.||Method and apparatus for electronic commerce|
|US6336095 *||20 nov. 1998||1 janv. 2002||Citibank, N.A.||Method for electronic merchandise dispute resolution|
|US6463534 *||26 mars 1999||8 oct. 2002||Motorola, Inc.||Secure wireless electronic-commerce system with wireless network domain|
|US6553412 *||28 avr. 2000||22 avr. 2003||Avantgo, Inc.||System, method, and computer program product for web content aggregation and development, and web content delivery to clients|
|US6892307 *||5 août 1999||10 mai 2005||Sun Microsystems, Inc.||Single sign-on framework with trust-level mapping to authentication requirements|
|US6957185 *||25 févr. 2000||18 oct. 2005||Enco-Tone, Ltd.||Method and apparatus for the secure identification of the owner of a portable device|
|US7100044 *||29 août 2001||29 août 2006||Sony Corporation||Public key certificate using system, public key certificate using method, information processing apparatus, and program providing medium|
|US7103676 *||4 nov. 2002||5 sept. 2006||Nokia Corporation||User-identifier translator and linking apparatus for XML-based services and corresponding method|
|US7171475 *||1 juin 2001||30 janv. 2007||Microsoft Corporation||Peer networking host framework and hosting API|
|US7185364 *||21 mars 2001||27 févr. 2007||Oracle International Corporation||Access system interface|
|US7194664 *||8 sept. 2003||20 mars 2007||Poon Fung||Method for tracing application execution path in a distributed data processing system|
|US20030191719 *||21 déc. 2001||9 oct. 2003||Intertrust Technologies Corp.||Systems and methods for secure transaction management and electronic rights protection|
|US20040030615 *||12 août 2002||12 févr. 2004||Ling Marvin T.||Systems and methods for distributing on-line content|
|1||*||"Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1," May 8, 2000. W3C Note, DevelopMentor, IBM Corp, Lotuc Corp, Microsoft, UserLand Software. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508/. 35 pages.|
|Brevet citant||Date de dépôt||Date de publication||Déposant||Titre|
|US8424077 *||16 avr. 2013||Irdeto Canada Corporation||Simplified management of authentication credentials for unattended applications|
|US8533291 *||7 févr. 2007||10 sept. 2013||Oracle America, Inc.||Method and system for protecting publicly viewable web client reference to server resources and business logic|
|US8725650 *||26 janv. 2012||13 mai 2014||Microsoft Corporation||Document template licensing|
|US20060291660 *||21 déc. 2005||28 déc. 2006||Telefonaktiebolaget Lm Ericsson (Publ)||SIM UICC based broadcast protection|
|US20080148373 *||18 déc. 2006||19 juin 2008||Garney David Adams||Simplified management of authentication credentials for unattended applications|
|US20130198038 *||26 janv. 2012||1 août 2013||Microsoft Corporation||Document template licensing|
|Classification aux États-Unis||726/9, 713/185, 726/28, 726/27, 726/10, 726/30|
|Classification internationale||G06F21/00, H04L9/32, H04L29/06|
|Classification coopérative||G06F21/31, H04L63/08, H04L63/0884, G06F2221/2115, H04L63/0407, G06F21/6263|
|Classification européenne||G06F21/62B5B, G06F21/31, H04L63/08J, H04L63/04A, H04L63/08|
|14 janv. 2004||AS||Assignment|
Owner name: INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION, NEW Y
Free format text: ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST;ASSIGNORS:BAZOT, PHILIPPE;LIVIGNI, FABRICE;CRESP, JACQUES;AND OTHERS;REEL/FRAME:014894/0728
Effective date: 20031017
|3 sept. 2012||REMI||Maintenance fee reminder mailed|
|20 janv. 2013||LAPS||Lapse for failure to pay maintenance fees|
|12 mars 2013||FP||Expired due to failure to pay maintenance fee|
Effective date: 20130120