US 4993068

I'll run targeted searches on the patent number and any litigation/docket references before summarizing.

Let me check for any litigation involving this patent specifically, and verify current legal status/assignment.

Search results as to litigation / CAFC 2026 dockets

I ran keyword searches for the patent number against litigation and Federal Circuit material. What surfaced:

• No record found of US 4,993,068 being asserted in any infringement action, and no CAFC 2026 docket entry referencing it. Every hit was the patent appearing as a cited reference — e.g., printed as a prior-art citation in a reexamination request and IPR file histories (Docket Alarm / PTAB exhibits from IPR2024-00846, IPR2024-00234, IPR2022-01135, IPR2013-00107) and in the "Cited By" lists of later Google Patents records (e.g., EP1128342B1, US6590998B2, US20130303056).
• Caution on a false positive: several search hits contain an "'068 patent" in litigation, but those are U.S. Patent No. D621,068 (a design patent, "Architectural Panel with Thatch Reed Design," asserted by 3form, Inc.). That is a different patent number and is not to be conflated with 4,993,068.
• Methodological caveat: my searches were open-web keyword queries, not a direct PACER/CAFC docket query. I cannot claim exhaustive docket coverage; I can only say no litigation involving 4,993,068 surfaced. Given the patent's status below, its economic enforceability window has long closed.

A CAFC Rule 36 judgment from April 7, 2026 did appear in results (Intuit Inc. v. SameSurf, Inc., No. 2024-2298), but it involves a different patent and is not related to 4,993,068.

Bibliographic summary — US 4,993,068

Uncertainty noted on expiry: the record shows both an "anticipated expiration" of 2009-11-27 (i.e., 20 years from filing) and the status "Expired – Fee Related." These two data points are not necessarily consistent (the latter implies lapse for non-payment of maintenance fees, potentially earlier than 2009-11-27). I would not assert a definitive expiration date without the USPTO maintenance-fee record.

Abstract (verbatim substance)

"An unforgeable personal identification system for identifying users at remote access control sites. The unforgeable personal identification system generates one-way encrypted versions of physically immutable identification credentials (facial photo, retinal scan, voice and finger prints). These credentials are stored on a portable memory device (credit card size). At a remote access control site, the user presents his portable memory device and the encrypted identification credentials are read. The user then submits physically to inputting of his physical identification characteristics to the remote access control site. Comparison is performed with the credentials obtained from the memory device and with the user's physical identity to determine whether to allow or deny access at the remote site."

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

The patent has two independent claims: claim 1 (system) and claim 22 (method). Claims 2–21 depend from claim 1; claims 23–32 depend from claim 22.

Claim 1 — System

A system for identifying people at remote access control sites, built from functional "means" blocks:

1. Generation side: means for generating encrypted physically immutable identification credentials of a user, including (a) processor means for digital data, and (b) text input means feeding the processor text data that includes privilege information in digital form.
2. Encryption: means to encrypt both the immutable biometric credentials and the text/privilege data using a predefined one-way encryption algorithm.
3. Portable storage: a portable memory means (e.g., the credit-card-sized card) holding the encrypted credentials.
4. Remote site (verification) side: (a) means for reading the encrypted credentials off the portable memory; (b) means for directly inputting the user's physically immutable identification (biometric capture at the point of use); and (c) means for comparing the directly-input biometric against the credential read from the card, which (i) indicates success or failure and (ii) allows access according to the privilege information if the comparison succeeds.

Distinguishing thrust: identity is bound to physically immutable traits and the whole record is one-way encrypted onto a portable token, so verification can occur off-line at a remote site, and privilege/entitlement data travels as part of the sealed credential.

Claim 22 — Method

A method counterpart with an authorization site and at least one remote access control site, comprising:

At the authorization site:

• collecting physically immutable identification credentials from the user;
• transmitting, by an input device, to a processor text data including privilege information in digital form;
• encrypting both the biometric credentials and the text data according to a predefined one-way encryption algorithm;
• issuing a portable memory device containing the encrypted credentials to the user.

At the remote access control site:

• reading the encrypted credentials from the user's portable memory device;
• obtaining the physically immutable identification credentials directly from the user;
• comparing the credentials from the device against those obtained directly from the user; and
• allowing access according to the privilege information if the comparison is successful.

Notable dependent-claim coverage (for context, not independent)

• RSA-type one-way public-key cryptography: claim 5 (system), claim 24 (method).
• Biometric modalities: video camera (7, 14), retinal scanner (8, 15), fingerprint reader (9, 16), voice print processor (10, 17), pressure-sensitive tablet for dynamic signature (11, 18).
• Denial on unsuccessful comparison: claim 19 (system, via access-control interface), claim 25 (method).
• Background vetting before issuance: claim 26; supporting text data and plain-text packet: claim 27; second encryption and writing to the portable device: claim 28.
• Decryption-integrity check and denial on improper decryption: claim 29; using decrypted text to support access: claim 30.
• Expiration handling: claim 31 places expiration data on the credentials; claim 32 reads it, determines validity, and rewrites the credentials to mark them expired to inhibit further use.

Literal-text observation: claim 18 reads "An forgeable personal identification system as claimed in claim 13" — the word in the granted text is "forgeable," not "unforgeable," as it appears in the other claims. I am reporting this literally rather than correcting it.

Prior art cited in the patent itself: U.S. Pat. No. 4,438,824 (Mueller-Schloer, "Apparatus and Method for Cryptographic Identity Verification," issued Mar. 27, 1984), cited in the Background as an example of centralized-database biometric verification.

Sources

• Full patent text (authoritative for this task): https://patents.google.com/patent/US4993068/en
• Bibliographic/abstract: https://nl.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?DB=EPODOC&II=21&ND=6&adjacent=true&locale=nl_NL&FT=D&date=19910212&CC=US&NR=[4993068A](/patent/4993068A)&KC=A
• Claims text: https://www.freepatentsonline.com/4993068.html
• Prior-art citation examples (no assertion against this patent): Docket Alarm PTAB exhibits at https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2024-00846/ and https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2022-01135/

Bottom line: US 4,993,068 is a 1991 Motorola patent (Piosenka & Chandos) on off-line biometric credential verification using one-way/RSA-type encryption of immutable physical traits plus privilege data written to a portable memory card, with 32 claims across two independents (system claim 1, method claim 22). I found no evidence it was ever litigated or reached the Federal Circuit, and it is recorded as expired.

I'll run targeted searches against litigation-tracking sources for US 4,993,068.

Let me query litigation-specific sources more directly.

Let me try a few more angles to be thorough before concluding.

Answer: No litigation involving US 4,993,068 was found

I ran targeted queries against open-web sources that index patent litigation (PACER-derived dockets via Justia/Docket Alarm/PacerMonitor, RPX/insight, the USPTO PTAB/PTACTS petition repository, and Federal Circuit and Supreme Court filings). I could not identify a single case in which U.S. Patent No. 4,993,068 ("Unforgeable personal identification system," Piosenka & Chandos, Motorola) was asserted as the patent-in-suit.

Because no case was found, I cannot supply the requested per-case fields (plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, outcome/status) — there is no matching case to populate them with.

What I did find — and why none of it is litigation of this patent

Every hit for the number resolved to US 4,993,068 appearing as prior art, not as an asserted patent:

False positives I deliberately excluded (per your no-auto-correct rule)

Several search results refer to "'068 patents" that are different patents, and must not be conflated with 4,993,068:

• U.S. Patent No. 7,573,068 — Solas OLED Ltd. v. LG Display, Apple, and HP, and Solas OLED Ltd. v. Motorola Mobility LLC (W.D. Tex., Judge Albright; e.g., Nos. 6:19-cv-00236-ADA, 6:19-cv-00537-ADA, 6:19-cv-00631-ADA). This is an OLED transistor-array-substrate patent, issued Aug. 11, 2009 — unrelated to the Motorola '068 at issue. (Note the coincidence of a Motorola defendant here, which makes it an easy trap.)
• A '068 patent filed September 21, 2005 referenced in a PTACTS petition ("Defendant in only one of three separate district court proceedings... the '068 patent is asserted"). Its 2005 filing date and 769-day term extension rule it out as 4,993,068.
• U.S. Patent No. D621,068 (3form design patent) — flagged in the earlier section as a distinct number.
• A CourtListener API response containing the integer 4993068 is a financial-disclosure investment record ID, not a patent — a pure numeric coincidence.

Why the absence of litigation is consistent with the record

US 4,993,068 carries a recorded status of Expired – Fee Related, with an anticipated expiration of 2009-11-27. Whether termination was by the 20-year term or by earlier non-payment of maintenance fees, the patent's enforceable term closed no later than November 2009 — more than sixteen years before the current date of April 26, 2026. It therefore had a bounded assertion window, and no assertion within that window surfaced.

Confidence and limitations

• High confidence that no litigation surfaced in the open-web sources I queried, and that the hits I saw are prior-art citations rather than assertions.
• Caveat: my queries were keyword-based web searches, not a direct, exhaustive PACER/CAFC/Unified Patents docket-field query on the patent number. Older pre-2000s district court dockets are especially thinly indexed online. I therefore cannot state categorically that no suit ever existed — only that none is known or discoverable from these sources. A definitive negative would require a structured search of PACER's full docket history and Docket Navigator / Lex Machina.
• I did not locate any PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR/CBM) in which US 4,993,068 was the challenged patent, nor any Federal Circuit appeal stemming from it.

Bottom line

No known litigation involves US 4,993,068. It appears in the record exclusively as a cited prior-art reference — the "Piosenka et al." patent — in other parties' prosecution, reexamination, and IPR papers. If you need a court-grade negative, the next step is a paid Docket Navigator / Lex Machina query on the patent number, since open-web searching cannot guarantee exhaustiveness for a patent that expired around 2009.

I'll verify the ODP's "no proceedings" result against live web sources before drafting.

Let me run a few more targeted checks — including whether the earlier-noted IPR file histories merely cite it as prior art, and whether any ex parte reexam exists.

One final verification pass on PTAB E2E-style sources and any defensive-aggregator filings.

Proceedings overview

Zero. As of 2026-09-28 there are no AIA trial proceedings — no IPR, no PGR, no CBM — on US 4,993,068, in the structured PTAB proceedings block (USPTO Open Data Portal, canonical) or in any web source I could reach; the breakdown is therefore 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials. Bottom line for a defendant: the absence is not a sign of a "hardened" patent — it is a sign of a dead one. The patent expired on 2009-11-27 (20 years from the 1989-11-27 filing date), roughly 2.8 years before the first IPR could legally be filed (AIA trial provisions took effect 2012-09-16). There is no PTAB record to attack with and no live right to defend against; if a demand letter cites US 4,993,068 (or "the '068 patent" tout court), the first question is whether the sender has confused it with a different, still-live patent.

There are no proceedings to list — and here is why the negative is solid

Because the requested per-proceeding template would require me to invent numbers, I am deliberately not filling it in. Instead, here is the negative-space evidence, since the task correctly notes that "absence is itself a signal."

Timeline forecloses the entire AIA trial regime. The record shows an anticipated expiration of 2009-11-27 and a legal status of "Expired – Fee Related" (see the internal inconsistency flagged in the previously generated bibliographic summary — I do not resolve it here, and it does not change the conclusion, since a lapse for non-payment would put expiration earlier, not later). The relevant dates:

False-positive proceedings I checked and cleared

The prior-art-citation hits are the same thing the earlier "Patent summary" section flagged — I confirm and sharpen that point: in every instance, 4,993,068 is the cited reference, never the challenged patent. The proceeding numbers below are real AIA trials, but they are on other patents.

Exhibit sources (illustrative, all showing citation-only usage): https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2024-00846/Microsoft_Corporation/docs/04-26-2024-Petitioner/Exhibit-1022-2-Ex_Parte_Re_examination_Request_of_905_patent_Part_2_of_4.pdf and https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2022-01135/Apple_Inc/docs/06-15-2022-Petitioner/Exhibit-1002-3-Ex1002___249_File_History_Part2_of_2.pdf.

Separately cleared false positive: several foreign search reports cite "US 4 993 068 A (Piosenka)" as an X or Y category reference against other people's later applications (e.g., WO 00/68898, GB 2 397 419 A, WO 2015/115879, WO 2010/128356, EP 1 347 420 A3, WO 02/095657). These are international search opinions in foreign prosecution — not U.S. AIA trials. An X-category citation against a 2003 GB application means the '068 disclosure anticipated or rendered obvious someone else's claim; it says nothing about the validity of the '068 claims themselves.

No ex parte reexamination either. My keyword searches surfaced no reexamination certificate, control number, or file history for 4,993,068. (Ex parte reexam is not an AIA trial, but it is the other way a patent gets administratively narrowed, so I checked. Caveat: this was open-web keyword searching, not a direct Reexam Certificate database query, so I state it as "none found," not "none exists.")

No Federal Circuit activity. Consistent with the earlier section, no CAFC appeal touching 4,993,068 appears; an appeal is impossible without a PTAB or district-court decision to appeal from.

One non-event worth naming so nobody over-reads it: Unified Patents' public portal carries a profile page for this patent (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-4993068-A). A portal profile is not a filing. Unified (and RPX, and similar aggregators) index huge numbers of patents for monitoring; this page reflects indexing, not a Unified-initiated IPR, and I found no Unified Patents proceeding against it.

Strategic summary

Claim status across the patent: all 32 claims are UNTESTED at the PTAB, and the question is moot. Claims 1–21 (system, independent claim 1) and claims 22–32 (method, independent claim 22) stand exactly as granted, with no PTAB-ordered cancellation, no certificate of correction narrowing them, and — from what I can find — no reexamination certificate. Nothing has been narrowed; nothing has been sustained under attack; nothing has been tested. There is simply no administrative record on this patent at all. That is a materially different posture from "hardened by surviving IPRs," and it should not be spun as the latter.

Estoppel landscape: effectively empty, and the more important bar is statutory, not estoppel. There are no petitioners, so no § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches to anyone, and no § 325(e) estoppel attaches either. But § 315(e)(2) is not the obstacle a defendant faces here — 35 U.S.C. §§ 311(c) and 321(c) are: an IPR or PGR petitioner must certify that the patent "is being asserted" against it or that it has been charged with infringement, and the Board's fee/incentive structure presumes a live property right. Practically, a party receiving a demand letter on an expired patent does not need PTAB estoppel analysis; it needs to identify the actual wrong patent number in the letter. Note also the diagnostic value of the negative: IPR is inexpensive relative to litigation ($100K–$250K median through FWD, per the CAPA primer at https://www.capanow.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/CAPA-Patent-Primer-Inter-Partes-Review.pdf). If anyone had believed this patent was worth enforcing with live claims, someone would have filed against it. The complete absence of IPRs, CBMs, reexams, district-court suits, and CAFC appeals over a 35-year life is strong corroboration that nothing enforceable ever remained in it.

Pattern signals: none, because there is no pattern to detect. No repeat petitioner, no serial filer, no patent-owner appeal practice, no defensive aggregator in the chain. The only recurring appearance of this patent anywhere in the PTAB corpus is as a prior-art citation inside other parties' exhibits — a signal about the 1990s biometric-credential art, not about this patent as a target. If you are building an invalidity case against a modern biometric-authentication patent, US 4,993,068 is one of your best prior-art references (see, e.g., the X-category citation against GB 2 397 419 A at https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/27/65/a2/06fccbede20459/GB2397419A.pdf and the Y-category citation at https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/80/55/a6/15cc9ba7238488/WO2015115879A1.pdf). That is its real defensive utility today.

Recommended next steps

• If you received a demand letter citing US 4,993,068: do not build a PTAB strategy. Confirm the patent-number identity first, because the realistic failure mode is a transcription or entity confusion (the earlier section correctly flagged U.S. Patent No. D621,068, the 3form "Architectural Panel with Thatch Reed Design" design patent, as a recurring false positive in keyword searches for "the '068 patent"). Verify status directly at https://patents.google.com/patent/US4993068/en against the USPTO Patent Center record, and pull the maintenance-fee history to resolve the "Expired – Fee Related" vs. "anticipated expiration 2009-11-27" inconsistency. If the letter really does assert 4,993,068, it is asserting an expired patent.
• If you are, instead, defending a modern biometric-credential patent: use 4,993,068 affirmatively as prior art. Its disclosure is broad — one-way/RSA-type encryption of immutable physical traits plus privilege data written to a portable memory card, remote off-line comparison, partitioned "need to know" decryption keys (col. 6), digital-signature/checksum sealing for long data sets (col. 6–7), and even credential-rewriting on expiry (claim 32). Foreign examiners have already treated it as an X/Y reference. It is § 102(b) art as of 1991-02-12.
• If you are looking for an IPR target: there is nothing here. No institution deadline, no FWD due date, no oral hearing, and no § 316(a)(11) one-year clock — because no petition exists and none is viable. Confirm current status yourself via PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/) and the USPTO Open Data Portal; my searches were open-web keyword queries, not direct E2E/PACER docket pulls, so I cannot claim exhaustive coverage of every paper ever filed. But every source I could reach converges: no AIA trial proceeding on US 4,993,068 has ever been filed, instituted, or decided.

Cross-reference note / consistency check: this section does not contradict the earlier "Patent summary" section — it independently reproduces its finding (no litigation, no CAFC appeal, expired) and explains the mechanism behind it (the AIA trial regime postdates the patent's expiration). The earlier section's list of IPR2024-00846 / IPR2024-00234 / IPR2022-01135 / IPR2013-00107 is confirmed as citation-only appearances; those numbers are proceedings on other patents and must not be reported as proceedings on 4,993,068.

I'll pull the recorded assignment data from the USPTO Assignment Center and cross-reference the corporate chain.

Methodological note before the findings: In this session I could reach the USPTO Assignment Center only through secondary indexes, not a direct reel/frame query. Specifically, my tool calls returned (a) the Google Patents legal-events block supplied as authoritative in the full patent text, (b) the Unified Patents portal record for US-4993068-A, and (c) various third-party prosecution exhibits citing the patent as prior art. I was not able to retrieve the raw Assignment Center hit list showing reel/frame numbers. I will therefore state plainly what is confirmed and flag what is not, rather than guess at reel/frame values.

Inventors

Two named inventors, both on the face of the issued patent:

Unusual-pattern check — inventor departure within 12 months of filing: No evidence found. The only year-adjacent datapoint is away from a departure signal: Motorola filed US 5,131,038, "Portable authentication system," on 1990-11-07 (issued 1992-07-14 to Motorola, Inc.), which appears in this patent's "Cited By" list — i.e., Motorola continued building on the same personal-identification/authentication line roughly 12 months after this filing. That is consistent with an ongoing corporate program, not with inventors walking out the door. I cannot confirm either inventor's post-1991 employment status from the sources I could reach; treat this as unclear rather than as a negative finding.

Original assignee

Motorola, Inc., a corporation of Delaware — named as assignee on the issued patent and as the assignee in the sole recorded assignment of inventors' interest (1989-11-27).

• Primary line of business at the time: Motorola, Inc. was a broad electronics/communications manufacturer (cellular infrastructure, two-way radio, semiconductors, government/security systems). The subject matter here — credential issuance plus remote access-control terminals — maps to its government/security and communications-systems business, not to a consumer product line.
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? Unclear / not established from the sources retrieved. The patent describes issuance hardware (FIG. 1) and a remote verification unit built around a 68HC11 crypto controller and DSP56001 (FIG. 4), but I found no product literature, catalog, or 10-K line item tying an actual Motorola product to these claims. The patent reads as a system architecture disclosure.
• Current status of the original assignee: Motorola, Inc. is not dissolved, but it no longer exists under that name. On 2011-01-04 it spun off its Mobile Devices and Home businesses as Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. and renamed the remaining entity Motorola Solutions, Inc. (Motorola Solutions is an operating, publicly traded company and continues the government/enterprise communications business). This is corroborated by a Motorola Solutions FCC filing expressly stating "the change in the name of Motorola, Inc. to 'Motorola Solutions, Inc.'" (fcc.report ELS 133207).
• Google Patents "Current Assignee" field lists Motorola Solutions Inc., and the Unified Patents portal independently lists the assignee as Motorola Solutions Inc. Note: Google Patents itself disclaims that listed assignees may be inaccurate, and — importantly — no post-issuance assignment or change-of-name recordation for US 4,993,068 appears in the legal-events block. The "Motorola Solutions" attribution is therefore most likely a corporate-succession inference applied across the Motorola portfolio, not a reel/frame-linked transfer I can cite for this patent.

Assignment timeline

Chronological list of recorded assignments surfaced for US 4,993,068:

• 1989-11-27 (executed) / recorded on or about 1989-11-27 — Reel/Frame: NOT CAPTURED IN THIS SESSION
  • Conveyance: Assignment ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST")
  • Assignor: Ronald V. Chandos; Gerald V. Piosenka (joint inventors)
  • Assignee: Motorola, Inc., a corp. of DE
  • Correspondent of record: Not retrievable in this session. (For a 1989 in-house Motorola filing, the correspondent would ordinarily be Motorola's own patent department / a Motorola in-house attorney, but I will not assert a name I could not verify.)
  • Context: Original inventor-to-employer assignment at filing — routine corporate ownership capture, not a reorg, securitization, or transfer-to-asserter.

No other recorded assignments appear anywhere in the record I could reach. Specifically:

• The Google Patents legal-events timeline for US4993068A shows only: filing (1989-11-27), the inventors→Motorola assignment (1989-11-27), grant (1991-02-12), and anticipated expiration (2009-11-27). No post-issuance reassignment, merger, change-of-name, or security-agreement recordation appears.
• No assignment record for this patent surfaced in any of the PTAB/IPR exhibit file histories that cite it (those are prior-art citations only, not ownership records).

Finding: the assignment record for US 4,993,068 consists of exactly one recorded instrument — the original inventor assignment to Motorola. Per the task's own framing, that is itself the answer: there is no assignment chain to reconstruct. I must also flag a limitation honestly — I could not open the Assignment Center hit list to pull the reel/frame for even that single instrument, so I cannot cite a reel/frame for it. Anyone needing the reel/frame should run the patent-number query directly at the Assignment Center (link in Verdict).

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 4993068
    1989 : Filed by Motorola Inc
         : Inventors assign to Motorola Inc
    1991 : Patent issued
    2009 : Anticipated expiration
    2011 : Motorola renamed Motorola Solutions

Diagram caveat: the 2011 entry is a corporate name change, not a recorded assignment for this patent. No reassignment document ties US 4,993,068 to Motorola Solutions; the link is corporate succession.

NPE / troll-pattern signals

One database discrepancy worth recording: the Unified Patents portal lists this patent's priority date as 1989-11-26, whereas the filing/priority date of record is 1989-11-27. That one-day variance appears to be a third-party data artifact and does not affect the ownership analysis.

Verdict

Insufficient data — the chain consists of only the original assignment.

Justification: The entire recorded history is a single instrument — the 1989-11-27 "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST" from inventors Chandos and Piosenka to Motorola, Inc., a corp. of DE — with no post-issuance transfer, no LLC, no asserter, and no correspondent recurrence to evaluate. Ownership has stayed with the original operating assignee or its corporate successor (Motorola Solutions, Inc., by the 2011-01-04 name change), the patent is recorded as Expired – Fee Related with anticipated expiration 2009-11-27, and no litigation asserting it was found. Because the record contains nothing beyond the original assignment, the rubric's "Insufficient data" category is the only one that fits — and the practical conclusion is that there is no NPE chain here at all, on any of the eight signals.

Verify directly (my session lacked direct query access):

• USPTO Assignment Center (search by patent number 4993068): https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Legacy Assignment Search: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events (authoritative text provided): https://patents.google.com/patent/US4993068/en
• Unified Patents portal record: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-4993068-A

Two caveats I will not paper over: (1) I could not obtain the reel/frame for even the one recorded assignment, so no reel/frame citation appears above — this should be pulled from the Assignment Center before the record is treated as final; and (2) the "Motorola Solutions Inc" current-assignee attribution rests on corporate succession and third-party databases, not on a reel/frame-linked recordation visible in the legal events I could retrieve. If Assignment Center shows a recorded CHANGE OF NAME for this patent, that would firm up caveat (2) but would not change the verdict.

I'll ground this in the actual cited references rather than recall. Let me pull the front-page prior-art citations for US 4,993,068.

I have the front-page reference list now. Let me verify each cited reference individually.

Tool-budget note (transparency first)

I hit the tool-call limit partway through this task. Concretely: 2 of the 7 cited U.S. references were fully verified, and the remaining lookups returned empty or were cut off. I am telling you which rows are verified and which are not rather than filling gaps from memory.

Also flagging a minor inconsistency in the inputs: the task header says "Current Date: April 26, 2026," while the operating context says today is 2026-09-28. I have not adjusted any dates; all dates below are as printed on the records themselves.

1. Scope: "citations for 4993068" — which direction?

There are two different citation sets on a patent, and they must not be mixed:

The previously generated summary already noted the forward-citation noise (PTAB exhibits, the D621,068 false positive). I will not repeat that. Note that the 836 "Cited By" entries are downstream documents — they are evidence of '068's own disclosure content, not prior art against it.

Examiner of record: Primary Examiner Thomas H. Tarcza; Assistant Examiner David Cain; Attorney/Agent Frank J. Bogacz (Motorola). Field of Search: 380/23, 380/24, 380/25, 380/30; 235/380; 340/825.34. Google Patents' assigned "prior art keywords" are: credentials, user, personal identification, access control, identification.

2. The complete reference list from [56] on the face of US 4,993,068

All seven are pre-filing (filing date 1989-11-27), so all are facially available as prior art. Only the first two are verified by me in this session.

No foreign patent documents and no non-patent literature are listed in the [56] block as reproduced by uspto.report — which is unusual for this art and is itself worth confirming against the official PDF.

3. Per-reference analysis

⭐ Reference A — US 4,438,824 (Mueller-Schloer) — the most relevant reference

Full citation: Christian Mueller-Schloer, "Apparatus and method for cryptographic identity verification," U.S. Patent No. 4,438,824; Appl. No. 256,523; filed Apr. 22, 1981; issued Mar. 27, 1984; assignee Siemens Corporation (Iselin, N.J.); 8 claims, 8 drawing figures.
URL: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4438824 · PDF: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/68/fa/45/e06e25f585745d/US4438824.pdf

Description. A terminal (4A) and a security service station (SSS) connected over an "unprotected communication system." The terminal contains a CPU + memory storing a public network key (PK.N), a card reader for a personal data card (PDC), a feature extractor (fingerprint sensor or voice; or PIN entry) for personal identification information, and a crypto module (DES unit plus a PKC unit that "may comprise a chip that works according to the so-called RSA method"). The card holds reference feature data plus a first key, and the reference feature data and key are encrypted with the public network key forming a first cryptogram. The cardholder's live features are extracted, encrypted, and sent to the SSS, where a comparator compares the transmitted personal identification information with the reference personal identification information (also transmitted from the terminal). There is also a "disconnection check" using a message number and time window, and a requirement that the terminal erase the DES key, card data, and extracted features after validation.

Claim-mapping under 35 U.S.C. § 102 (as issued, pre-AIA):

Prosecution significance: This is the only prior art discussed by name in '068's own Background ("One such system as that described immediately above, is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,438,824…"). The applicant used it as the admitted example of the centralized-database architecture that '068 was designed to eliminate — off-line, card-resident verification. That is a §102 argument the examiner considered and evidently did not adopt.

⭐ Reference B — US 4,532,508 (Ruell) — closest on the core "biometric bound to a portable token" idea

Full citation: Hartwig Ruell, "Personal authentication system," U.S. Patent No. 4,532,508; publication date July 30, 1985 (printed on the '068 face list as "July 1985"); assignee Siemens Corporate Research & Support (per the INPADOC family record alongside EP 0121222 A2, priority 1983-04-01, applicant Siemens AG).
URL: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4532508

Description. Scrambled information corresponding to a person's personal features is stored on a portable storage medium (an identification card; the disclosure expressly contemplates a hologram, scrambled magnetic recording, or a light-modulating system). At the point of use, the person's personal features (fingerprints) are sensed on-site, a "characteristic scramble key" is derived from the live features, and that key is used to decode the stored comparison signals; the decoded signals are then compared to verify identity.

Claim-mapping under § 102:

Strategic note: Ruell is the reference most likely to be re-raised by a third party challenging '068, precisely because it teaches the off-line, card-resident, biometric-keyed model — and it is why the "one-way/public-key" limitation in claims 4–5 and the "privilege information" limitation in claims 1 and 22 carry most of the patent's weight.

References C–G — not verified in this session

I could not retrieve titles or disclosures for these within the tool budget. I am not going to supply titles from memory, because a wrong title in a prior-art chart is worse than a blank. What I can say with confidence is limited to the bibliographic data the USPTO printed on the face of '068 (table in §2), plus this:

• US 4,853,522 (Ogasawara, Aug. 1989) — issued only ~3 months before '068 was filed, so it is §102(e)/§102(a) art by issue date only; its filing date must be checked if a §102(e) theory is used. My (low-confidence, unverified) recollection is that it concerns individual identification apparatus, i.e. a biometric reader/comparator. If that recollection is right, it is the most likely of C–G to map onto claims 2, 9, and 16 (collect/convert; fingerprint reading means) and onto the comparison limitation of claim 1. Treat as unconfirmed.
• US 4,825,050 (Griffith et al., Apr. 1989) and US 4,798,403 (Nelson, Jan. 1989) — both post-date Ruell and pre-date '068's filing; both are plausibly card/access-control art. Contents unverified.
• US 4,785,290 (Goldman, Nov. 1988) — contents unverified.
• US 3,896,266 (Waterbury, July 1975) — the earliest reference on the list, and therefore the only one plainly available under pre-AIA §102(b) (more than one year before the 1989-11-27 filing) without any date analysis. Description unverified.

How to close these gaps (four lookups): USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter at https://ppubs.uspto.gov and https://patentcenter.uspto.gov; Google Patents at https://patents.google.com/patent/US4785290, …/US4798403, …/US4825050, …/US4853522, …/US3896266; and the printed face page via https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com (search "US4993068.pdf") to confirm the [56] block verbatim.

4. Legal caveats you should carry into any §102 assertion

1. These are references the examiner already had. '068 issued over all seven. That does not make a §102 challenge impossible (examiners miss things, and the printed [56] list is not proof of what was substantively argued), but it shifts the burden: any anticipation theory must explain why the examiner's apparent reading was wrong.
2. Anticipation requires a single reference disclosing every element as arranged in the claim — including, for '068 claims 1 and 22, (a) text data including privilege information transmitted by a text input means, (b) encrypted together with the biometric under a predefined one-way encryption algorithm, (c) stored on a portable memory, and (d) an access decision made "according to said privilege information." None of the verified references (A, B) discloses (a) or (d). That is the load-bearing distinction of this patent.
3. Date law is pre-AIA here (filed 1989-11-27): §102(a)/(b) key off the reference's issue/publication date; §102(e) keys off its U.S. filing date and requires the reference to be a U.S. patent/application publication. Two of the seven (Ogasawara, and Ruell's U.S. filing vs. its EP priority) need filing-date verification before a §102(e) theory is asserted.
4. Corroboration that '068 itself functions well as §102/§103 art against others: an examiner rejecting claims of another application treated "Piosenka et al. (US 4,993,068)" as teaching biometric data input means and validation, and specifically relied on "the modem disclosed in Piosenka et al." as the communication unit outputting biometric signal information to a remote site. See USPTO PTAB/PTActs record at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1524142](/patent/1524142)/download-documents. That is a useful, independent characterization of '068's disclosure scope — and it is consistent with §3 above.

5. Bottom line

• The prior art actually cited in US 4,993,068 consists of seven U.S. patents, all pre-dating the 1989-11-27 filing date: 3,896,266; 4,438,824; 4,532,508; 4,785,290; 4,798,403; 4,825,050; 4,853,522.
• The two most relevant are US 4,438,824 (Mueller-Schloer) — the closest overall architecture (data card + biometric feature extractor + RSA-capable PKC module), but with a centralized comparator, which is exactly the architecture '068 was written to displace — and US 4,532,508 (Ruell) — the closest on off-line, portable-token, biometric-verified identity.
• Neither verified reference discloses the privilege/attribute text data encrypted with the biometric under a one-way algorithm and used to gate access; that limitation, together with the RSA-type limitation of claims 5/24, is where '068's patentability actually rests.
• Five of the seven references (3,896,266; 4,785,290; 4,798,403; 4,825,050; 4,853,522) are unverified in this session. I have given you their USPTO-printed bibliographic data and nothing more, rather than reconstructed titles.

I'll gather prior-art detail before running the §103 analysis. Let me pull the references cited on the face of this patent and the early biometric-token art.

Let me pull the front-page references cited on the patent, plus the key early "biometric data card" art that predates the 1989 filing.

Let me recover the actual front-page "References Cited" for US 4,993,068 and check a few more early references.

Obviousness Analysis — US 4,993,068 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Patent: US 4,993,068 (Piosenka & Chandos, Motorola) — "Unforgeable personal identification system"
Critical date: filed/priority November 27, 1989 → prior art must predate that date (or qualify under §102(a)/(b)/(e)).
Source (authoritative): https://patents.google.com/patent/US4993068/en

1. Scope, evidence base, and honest caveats

Cross-reference note: The previously generated sections already flagged (a) the "Expired – Fee Related" vs. "anticipated expiration 2009-11-27" inconsistency, and (b) that no litigation involving 4,993,068 surfaced. I do not repeat those; the only thing I add is that for §103 purposes the legal status is irrelevant — an expired patent can still be the target of an ex parte reexamination, and expiration does not change the prior-art analysis.

Two methodological cautions you need up front:

1. The page's "Prior Art" section is not a single list. On Google Patents, "Prior art keywords / Prior art date" are metadata, "Patent Citations" (the §56/§102 references cited on or against the patent) are potentially prior art, and "Cited By" (836 entries here) are later patents and are NOT prior art against a 1989 filing. Almost nothing a practitioner would use for a §103 rejection of this patent appears in the "Cited By" list. Treating that list as prior art would be an analytical error.
2. I could not retrieve the front-page "(56) References Cited" table for 4,993,068 from the material available. I am therefore not going to pretend I know the examiner's actual citations. My reference set below is built from (i) the one patent the '068 specification itself cites, (ii) well-documented pre-1989 art in the same field, and (iii) the applicant-admitted prior art (AAPA) in the '068 Background — which is fully citable under MPEP §2129 and is the strongest lever in this case.

2. Governing framework and PHOSITA

• Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966): scope/content of prior art → differences → level of ordinary skill → secondary considerations.
• KSR Int'l v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007): a combination of known elements is obvious where the improvement is the "predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions"; any articulated reason — design incentive, market demand, "obvious to try" — suffices, and the motivation need not be found in the references themselves.
• MPEP §2143 rationales are the operative checklist; §2129 makes the specification's own Background admissions usable as prior art.

PHOSITA (level of ordinary skill), circa 1989: a systems/security engineer with a bachelor's degree in EE or CS and roughly 2–4 years' experience in access-control hardware, card readers, and applied cryptography — comfortable with public-key systems (RSA, Diffie-Hellman), hash/checksum-based digital signatures, credit-card-sized memory media (mag-stripe, EEPROM, optical), and at least one biometric capture modality. This is low-to-moderate skill; the components the '068 assembles are described in the specification itself as "commercially available items."

3. The prior-art reference set (all pre-11/27/1989 unless noted)

Key point: F is not neutral background. The '068 specification admits every functional building block except the specific packaging — encrypted privilege data on a portable card (F-i), biometric capture at an access point (F-iii), and PKI (C/D) are all old.

4. What the '068 claims actually add over A + B + F

Stripped of means-plus-function boilerplate, independent claim 1 requires only:

1. a generator that produces encrypted immutable biometric credentials; with a text input feeding privilege information into the processor;
2. encryption of both the biometric and the text data under a predefined one-way algorithm;
3. a portable memory holding that ciphertext;
4. at a remote site: read the ciphertext, directly capture the biometric, compare, and grant access per the privilege information on success.

Independent claim 22 is the same sequence as method steps. The specification's own stated objects — off-line verification, no 24/7 central database, portability, low remote-site cost — are the problem statement, not the solution.

That is the entire delta. The §103 question is therefore narrow: was it obvious, as of 11/27/1989, to take a card-borne PK-encrypted biometric credential (A) and put the privilege attributes on the same card and do the comparison at the remote reader instead of the central station?

5. Claim 1 — claim chart

Result: Every element of claim 1 is disclosed or rendered obvious by A + B in view of F. A supplies the crypto-card-biometric-verification core; B supplies the card-resident reference template (and proof that putting reference data on the card is a known, desirable way to eliminate a shared verification device); F supplies the privilege/attribute data and the articulated problem.

6. Motivation to combine (the KSR rationales)

This is where the rejection is strongest, because the motivation is admitted in the patent itself:

1. Identified need / art-recognized problem (KSR; MPEP 2144.05(I)). The '068 Background states that centralized biometric databases are "very expensive," cause "intolerable access delays," and fail on communications outage. That is an express motivation to move comparison to the remote site and reference data onto the card.
2. Predictable use of known elements according to their established functions (KSR). A's comparator already compares captured-vs-reference identification and outputs a grant/deny; relocating that same comparison from A's "security service station" to A's own terminal is pure relocation of a known function — a design choice, not an invention. B teaches precisely this relocation ("verification is carried out on the very data carrier … the risk … is eliminated").
3. Obvious to try / finite set of identified solutions. Given a card-borne biometric credential that must be verified off-line, controlling the comparator either (i) at the remote reader or (ii) on the card is a two-option design space with a predictable outcome; the '068 specification itself describes both (its FIG. 4 uses a remote crypto-controller microcomputer; B uses on-card comparison).
4. Market/design incentive (KSR). A's stated advantage that terminals "can be kept inexpensive" because the comparator is shared dovetails with the '068's own stated object of a "relatively low cost" remote unit; the '068 merely trades a shared comparator for cheap local commodity parts — the specification concedes the remote site uses "commercially available items."
5. Combining AAPA with A/B is not hindsight. F already couples encrypted privilege/clearance data to a card presented at an access-control reader. Adding a biometric to that already-existing encrypted-credential card to bind it to its bearer is the natural, and repeatedly suggested, next step — the same step A already teaches.
6. Reasonable expectation of success. All components are digital, individually known, and interoperable; A already demonstrates that a PK-encrypted biometric reference plus a comparator produces an accept/reject result with the desired reliability.

Teaching away? No. A expresses a preference for central comparison as a cost optimization; a preference is not a teaching away (In re Gurley/KSR, "the existence of an alternative design … does not establish teaching away"). B similarly prefers on-card comparison. Two known alternatives, each with a known trade-off, is the classic case of obviousness, not departure from the art.

7. Claim 22 (independent method claim)

Same mapping, in step form: collecting immutable biometrics (A, B), inputting privilege text to a processor (F), one-way encrypting biometric + text (A + C/D), issuing a portable memory device (A, B, F), then at the remote site reading, directly re-capturing the biometric, comparing, and allowing access per the privilege information (A, B, F).

Claim 22 adds no step not already required by claim 1 and admits the same admitted-problem motivation. Ground: A + B + C/D in view of F, with the same KSR rationales as §6. The method format ("transmitting, by an input device, to a processor") is satisfied by A's input device feeding A's CPU.

8. Dependent claims — grouped grounds

Note on claim 18 (building on the prior section's literal-text finding): the granted text of claim 18 reads "An forgeable personal identification system as claimed in claim 13," not "unforgeable." This is a §112 defect, not a §103 escape hatch. Under the broadest reasonable interpretation, claim 18 still incorporates all of claim 13's limitations; the error in the preamble of a dependent claim does not narrow the appended structure, so the §103 ground in the table above applies unchanged.

9. Rebuttal exposure / where the rejection could fail

A rigorous challenger should concede these pressure points:

• "Text data" ≠ "privilege information." A's input device is described for "personal features or personal identification numbers." A PIN is a knowledge factor, arguably not "privilege information." The rejection therefore must lean on F (clearance level on mag-stripe cards) for this element; A alone will not carry it. If F were excluded, claim 1's "text data including privilege information" is the element with the thinnest disclosure.
• A's comparison is centralized. A §103 rejection needs the explicit KSR bridge (relocation of a known comparator; admitted problem) — it cannot rely on A alone.
• Refusing to combine. A patentee would argue A's architecture (central SSS) and B's architecture (on-card) are divergent and that A's cost rationale affirmatively favors centralization. This is a preference, and KSR/Gurley defeat it — but expect the argument.
• Secondary considerations. None are evidenced. There is no known litigation, no license, no identified industry praise, and no unexpected-result data for '068 (per the prior sections' findings). Off-line operation was the predictable consequence of moving known functions, and long-felt need alone, without nexus to a claimed difference, does not rebut.
• I have not seen the (56) references. If the actual examiner citations included art closer than A/B (e.g., an encrypted-photo ID-card patent), the §103 case gets stronger; I make no claim either way.

10. Bottom line

Claim 1 and claim 22 are, on this record, obvious under §103 over US 4,438,824 (Mueller-Schloer) in view of US 4,582,985 (Lofberg) and the applicant-admitted prior art of the '068 Background, further in view of US 4,405,829 / US 4,200,770 for the RSA-type limitation as recited in claims 5 and 24.

• Strongest rationales: (1) the patent's own admission of the central-database problem supplies the motivation; (2) relocation of A's known comparator from a central station to the local reader (as B teaches for the card) is predictable use of known elements per KSR; (3) F already puts encrypted privilege/clearance data on cards read at access-control points.
• Highest-confidence dependent-claim grounds: RSA-type crypto (5, 24) and biometric modality selection (7–11, 14–18).
• Weakest: claims 31–32 (expiration + write-back invalidation) — flagged for a dedicated prior-art search, not asserted.
• Caveat discipline: the 836-entry "Cited By" list is later art and cannot support a §103 rejection of this patent; and I could not verify the front-page (56) citations, so my reference set (A, B, C, D, E, F) is constructed from the patent's own citation, well-documented pre-1989 art, and the specification's admissions — not from a recovered examiner citation list.

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4993068/en · https://patents.google.com/patent/US4438824 · https://uspto.report/patent/grant/4438824 · https://patents.google.com/patent/US4582985A/en · https://patents.searchlight.law/doc/US4582985 · https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/71/22/87/c0249be17d2a19/WO2008030184A1.pdf (US 4,200,770 / US 4,405,829) · https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/d9/5f/24/d23747c6ef574d/WO2000048133A1.pdf (EP 0 159 539 A) · https://www.freepatentsonline.com/4993068.html