Appeal 2007-1241
Application 09/794,486
Furthermore, Bacha teaches an alternative embodiment in which “the
document originator may sign and/or encrypt the document … before
submitting it to his vault for storage. However, the document … will be re-
signed and re-encrypted by the user’s vault, as any other document would be
handled” (emphasis added)(col. 7, ll. 43-49). These sections of Bacha
unambiguously show that the vaults shown in Figure 2 are located remote
from the clients, at the document repository system, described by Bacha as a
server (col. 4, ll. 33-50), and that the encryption occurs in the vault at the
server side. After carefully reviewing the entirety of Bacha, we find no
disclosure teaching or suggesting that the user vaults either are or could be
located at the user’s own computers, as asserted by Appellant (Br. 13).
Therefore, since the user vault is located at the document repository
system, which is a server remote from the client, we find that Bacha
anticipates the claimed limitation “encrypting the transmitted user data at
said server”.
Regarding Appellant’s note that “[c]laim 1 requires a method where
the user provides data used to encrypt the data, and where the user’s
encryption key is stored at the server” (Br. 14), we note that Appellant has
not provided any substantive arguments directed to this assertion, merely
noting that this feature allows the user to forget the key. The Examiner
pointed to column 6, lines 52-54 in support of this limitation (Answer 5).
We agree with the Examiner that Bacha teaches the user providing data used
to encrypt the data and storing, at the server, the encryption key used to
encrypt the data (col. 6, ll. 51-54; Fig.3, 304).
5
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