Invalidity dossier

US 7237267

Policy-based network security management

Current assignee: Cisco Technology Inc

Added 9/21/2026, 4:03:38 AM

At a glanceNo PTAB challengesNo litigation on file

Active provider: DeepSeek · deepseek-flash

Patent summary

Title, assignee, inventors, filing/issue dates, abstract, and a plain-language overview of the claims.

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Patent Overview — US 7,237,267 B2

Title: Policy-based network security management

Patent number: US7237267B2 (application US10/688,051)

Assignee: Cisco Technology, Inc. (original and current assignee as listed)

Inventors: Ammar Rayes and Michael Cheung

Key dates: Filing/priority date 2003-10-16; publication of application US20050086502A1 on 2005-04-21; patent granted/publication 2007-06-26. Google Patents lists legal status as "Expired – Lifetime," with adjusted expiration 2024-09-07.

Purpose: The patent addresses managing security of a network system, and more specifically policy-based network security management. It describes attacks of two types: (1) an action deemed illegal by the network intended to contaminate stored network information (e.g., poisoning an ARP table via false MAC/IP associations — IP and MAC spoofing); and (2) legal actions carried out at exceedingly high intensity to cause failure, commonly Denial of Service (DoS), e.g., DHCP flooding and ARP table flooding.

Plain-language scope: The supplied excerpt describes a security management controller with processors and a computer-readable medium whose instructions: receive a set of data about a user of a computer network; automatically decide on a course of action based on that data — where the course of action may be adverse to the user even though the data is insufficient to establish whether the user is performing a malicious action; and send signals to one or more network elements to implement the decision. The controller may reside in a Network Operations Center. Decisions may combine a historical parameter (user risk level), current-usage parameters (health level), and network alert state (alert level). A health parameter is computed from entire-network health and individual-resource health and used for corrective action. Figures include FIG. 1 (system block diagram), FIG. 2 (example method flow), and FIG. 3 (computer system).

Not established by the excerpt: The full claim set, the complete specification, the precise algorithm for combining risk/alert/health levels, and the specific actions available. Classification and prior-art keyword data are present but not substantive.

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7237267/en

Generated 10/1/2026, 10:02:34 PM

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Litigation summary

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Proceedings on file (0)

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No PTAB proceedings on file. This patent has not been challenged via IPR, PGR, or CBM. The absence is itself a signal — well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs. The LLM analysis below may surface filings the ODP feed hasn’t indexed yet.

PTAB challenges

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Assignment history

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Prior art

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Obviousness

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Extensions

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Derivative works

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