Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
1999-02-24
2003-06-03
Homere, Jean R. (Department: 2177)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C709S203000, C709S219000, C709S229000, C713S156000, C713S161000, C713S168000, C713S170000, C713S176000, C713S182000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06574627
ABSTRACT:
CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS
Not applicable (no prior applications for this invention)
References to related patents and publications:
U.S. Patent Documents
U.S. Pat. No. 5,732,218 March 1998 Bland, et al. 395/200.54
U.S. Pat. No. 5,812,776 September 1998 Gifford 395/200.47
U.S. Pat. No. 5,812,769 September 1998 Graber et al. 395/200.12
U.S. Pat. No. 5,751,956 May 1998 Kirsch 395/200.33
U.S. Pat. No. 5,708,780 January 1998 Levergood, et al. 395/200.59
Foreign Patent Documents
WO9826571 June 1998 WIPO H04M15/00
WO9827502 June 1998 WIPO G06F19/00
Other bibliographic references
Pitkow. In Search of Reliable Usage Data on the WWW. Proceedings of the International WWW Conference, 1997.
Naor and Pinkas. Secure Efficient Metering. Proceedings of Eurocrypt, 1998.
Franklin and Malkhi. Auditable Metering with Lightweight Security. Proceedings of the Financial Cryptography Workshop, 1997.
Krawczyk, Bellare and Canetti. HMAC: Keyed Hashing for Message Authentication, IETF-RFC 2104, 1997.
Berners-Lee, et al. Hypertext Transfer Protocol—HTTP/1.0, IETF-RFC 1945, 1996.
Berners-Lee, et al. Hypertext Transfer Protocol—HTTP/1.1, IETF-RFC 2068, 1997.
Anderson and Kuhn. Tamper Resistance—a Cautionary Note. Proceedings of the Usenix Workshop on Electronic Commerce, 1996.
M. K. Reiter, V. Anupam and A. Mayer. Detecting Hit-shaving in Click-through Payment Schemes. Third Usenix Workshop on Electronic Commerce, Boston, 1998.
STATEMENT REGARDING FED SPONSORED RESEARCH OR DEVELOPMENT
Not applicable
REFERENCE TO A MICROFICHE APPENDIX
Not applicable
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to client-server computer communication systems. Specifically, this invention considers systems in which relevant data about communications between a server and many clients is logged and certified. Still more particularly, a preferred embodiment of this invention relates to systems on the World Wide Web (WWW) where a third party agency audits and certifies access statistics of an HTTP server receiving requests from a plurality of HTTP clients.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The Internet is currently the largest computer network, counting several millions of interconnected computers that exchange information using the widespread TCP/IP Protocol. The Internet's most popular information system is the World Wide Web (WWW, the Web). The Web is a client-server distributed hypermedia system, based on the HTTP protocol. On-line Web advertisement represents a significant portion of Internet-related revenues. However, no reliable and widespread system for metering Web site accesses has emerged. As a consequence, a few well-known sites, such as the main news sites and the most effective search engines dominate the market, because their popularity is taken as a given fact. For many sites of medium to high popularity, there is a great potential for increasing advertisement profits, but investors need third party evaluation of purported access rates and characteristics.
Since it is reasonable to expect that advertisement profits grow with the site's popularity, there are valid reasons for the Web site's institution to forge metering data. Forging the file that stores access data is not the only method to obtain false metering information. In the WWW setting, for example, there exists a technique called “IP spoofing” that allows an HTTP client, under specific circumstances, to masquerade as another client, with a different IP address. This method could be used to produce many fictitious requests addressed to an HTTP server, which in turn would record an increased number of hits. For a third party to guarantee the correctness of Web server access statistics, it is necessary to provide an apparatus that avoids metering data falsification by the Web site's institution. For obvious reasons of standardization, this goal should be reached without the need of modifying the client, and with as few modifications as possible on the server side.
Much work has been devoted to the problem of understanding, summarizing and correcting access logs. The paper by Pitkow, published in the Proc. of the Int. WWW Conference, 1997, provides a good survey, with special reference to the use of proxies. U.S. Pat. No. 5,732,218 is also related to the issue of gathering Web site statistics, using both server-side and client-side arrangements. A number of commercial products for analyzing Web server logs are available. Most of the above work, however, does not deal with the intentional falsification by the organization running the server. For this problem, which is the subject of the present invention, two recent studies are of interest.
The work by Naor and Pinkas, on “Secure Efficient Metering” (published in the Proc. of Eurocrypt 1998), is based on secret sharing among clients, and transmission of secret shares from client to server, so that that the server may prove its purported hit rate by reconstructing the original secret. This requires a special initialization of clients that is not practically feasible in a Web setting. The same problem may be observed in some embodiments of U.S. Pat. No. 5,732,218.
The work by Franklin and Malkhi on “Auditable Metering with Lightweight Security” (published in the Proc. of the Financial Cryptography Workshop, 1997), uses a timing scheme to raise the cost of false client requests, so that it becomes uninteresting to forge a high number of hits. This was also granted patent WIPO WO9826571 in 1998. The technique by Franklin and Malkhi requires normal clients to perform extra computations just for the purpose of auditing, and this may be unattractive for commercial servers.
The present invention allows third parties to verify hits in a secure way, without changing clients in any way, and with a very minor overhead. The invention requires that the protocol used by clients and servers support any form of redirection or referrals; in particular, it may be applied to the HTTP protocol, which allows for redirection. The redirection capabilities of HTTP were used in previous US patents. U.S. Pat. No. 5,812,776 uses HTTP redirection to allow users to identify a resource by means of a traditional locator, such as a telephone number—a first server will then map this locator to an IP address and redirect the client automatically to the actual resource available from a second server. Server-to-server interactions related to redirection have been used for access control in U.S. Pat. No. 5,708,780 and in WIPO patent WO9827502.
Redirection was used in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,751,956 and 5,812,769 for tracking client requests, a goal that is related to the present invention as well as to WIPO patent WO9826571, discussed above. The same problem of tracking client request paths is studied in the work by Reiter et al., published in the proceedings of the Third Usenix Workshop on Electronic Commerce, 1998. These studies consider a situation where a user visits a first Web site, and then uses a hyperlink on said first Web site to connect to a second Web site. For example, said first Web site could be a search engine server, and the second Web site could be an electronic commerce facility advertised on said first Web site. Both sites are interested in keeping track of the user's action to monitor advertisement effectiveness and agree on corresponding fees. Redirection and specific security measures are suggested in the above studies to make user tracking possible and reliable. However, redirection is used heavily, and may slow client responsiveness in a significant way. Moreover, the above studies and patents do not solve the general problem of veriyfing the number and the characteristics of client connections received by a server.
The present invention provides a viable and general solution for auditing Web site popularity. The solution is very efficient, because it uses redirection with a small probability in order to cause external references of client accesses to an HTTP server. In a preferred embodiment, redirection can be limited to a very small percentage of client requests, because tamper-evident hardwar
Bergadano Francesco
De Mauro Pancrazio
LandOfFree
Method and apparatus for the verification of server access... does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with Method and apparatus for the verification of server access..., we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Method and apparatus for the verification of server access... will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-3161814