Ten years of patent filings in digital identity and security.
Named inventor on sixty-six patent families across identity, verification, provenance and physical security. The first was filed in January 2016, when almost nobody was arguing about how you prove a person is real. Sixty-one of them are pending now. In between, the field caught up: later filings by Alipay, iCrypto, In-Idt and China Life Insurance all cite this work as prior art.
What these words mean here
Six terms that are not interchangeable, and are not used interchangeably anywhere on this site.
Patent family
One invention and every application filed for it. WO2017118763A1, EP3400695A1 and GB2548073A are three members of one family and are counted once. The figure of sixty-six counts families, not documents.
Pending application
Filed and live at the office, not yet examined to a conclusion. It confers no enforceable right. Sixty-one of the families here are pending applications.
Granted patent
An application the office has allowed, which is the only kind that can be enforced. The status of every filing below is printed on its own row and links to its own entry on the public register, which is where the position should be read from rather than from a summary.
Named inventor
The person the filing names as having devised the invention. It is a statement about authorship, not about ownership. Every figure quoted on this site counts only filings naming Louis-James Davis as an inventor.
Applicant
The party that filed, and the party that would hold any right arising from the filing. It is named on every row below, and it is not the same for every filing: several companies and, on six, Louis-James Davis personally.
Ceased or withdrawn
An application that was not carried forward. The disclosure stands permanently and fixes a priority date; the application itself is not in force and confers nothing. All five published families below are in this state.
What is being filed now
Sixty of the sixty-one pending filings, all United Kingdom applications and all software; the mechanical one is listed separately below. Each one comes out of a problem met while building production systems rather than from a research programme. They are not all filed by the same company, so the applicant is named on each. Where a filing has been indexed, its number links to its own entry on the United Kingdom public register, so none of that has to be taken on trust. The newest are still inside the office's security check and have no record to link to yet.
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GB2619016.5 Pending
Method and system for detecting substitution of an identity document during re-verification
Catches a second genuine document carrying a similar face by comparing the chip portrait read today against the one read at enrolment.
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GB2619018.1 Pending
Method and system for limiting cumulative disclosure of a credential attribute across a plurality of predicate responses
Answer enough yes or no questions about a date of birth and you have learned the date of birth. This meters the disclosure rather than the question.
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GB2619020.7 Pending
Method and system for selectively uniform denial of a context-gated access request according to the probeability of each failed condition
A refusal that explains itself teaches an attacker how to pass. This partitions failures by whether naming the reason hands over a usable oracle.
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GB2619034.8 Pending
Method and system for detecting forgery of a certification mark from unresolvable verification requests under a bounded linkability window
A forged mark is not found by inspecting it. It is found when people in the field keep scanning something the register has never heard of, and that pattern is visible without tracking anyone.
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GB2619035.5 Pending
Method and system for re-verifying a subject by challenges whose occurrence is decoupled from suspicion by rate modulation
A challenge that only fires when you look suspicious tells an attacker exactly where the threshold sits. Here suspicion sets the rate, never the occurrence, so no single challenge means anything.
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GB2619062.9 Pending
Method and system for explaining an automated decision at a disclosure tier selected according to whether the explanation would permit enumeration of a protected data set
Tell someone their chosen name is too close to a protected brand and you have confirmed which brands are on the list. Ask again with other names and the refusal message becomes a lookup service. This decides, rule by rule, how much of a reason can safely cross back.
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GB2619116.3 Pending
Method and system for concealed class-wide escalation and disjoint notification following failed authorisation
A refusal is a measurement. Fail once and an ordinary system tells you, by its message or merely by answering faster, whether anyone noticed. Here the attempt raises the bar across every route to the same damage and quietly brings other people in to watch, while the person who failed is told exactly what they would have been told on an ordinary bad day.
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GB2619195.7 Pending
Multi-party identity certificate with conditional disclosure
A certificate proving who several parties are becomes a liability the moment it is forwarded, because it is legible to whoever ends up holding it. This one travels sealed and opens only for a reader whose presence is vouched for by the premises they are standing in, a bank or a firm of solicitors, rather than by their own device claiming a position.
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GB2619198.1 Pending
Grading of verified events by evidence quality
A wireless network shared with a whole building proves somebody reached the lobby, not that they reached their desk. Most systems add that to everything else and call the record strong. Here each piece of evidence sets a ceiling instead, so no quantity of vague evidence can produce a record only precise evidence could justify.
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GB2619192.4 Pending
Network system for managing multi-party arrangements
An opportunity that needs four parties stops being one the moment a single participant no longer qualifies, and whether they qualify is held by registers and regulators rather than by the platform. This withdraws it before anyone acts, without telling the others whose circumstances changed.
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GB2619208.8 Pending
Accumulated standing in a digital identity service
Standing built up by being verified as the same person again and again, held by the person rather than kept as a list by the service, and impossible to advance by waiting. A relying party is told it stands at least at a given level, never how many times or when.
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GB2619220.3 Pending
Continuity of identity across repeated enrolment
A face enrolled at five recognises nobody at twenty-five, so any record held for decades means re-enrolling the same person again and again. Each renewal proves who is standing there today and nothing at all about whether they are the person enrolled last time. Here every renewal must prove continuity with the one before it, and the older parts of a record are served only where that chain is unbroken.
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GB2619415.9 Pending
Method and system for verifiable attestation of a data-retention property of a server
Every service tells you what it does not keep about you, and that statement is a sentence somebody typed once and nobody rechecks. Here it is worked out from the running database every time it is asked for, so the moment a column is added that could record who sent a message, the service stops saying it cannot. Nobody has to notice, and nobody has to be taken on trust.
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GB2619610.5 Pending
Method and system for enforcing a data-retention property of a server by derivation of a permitted storage schema and a published assertion from a common register
Saying you cannot keep something is one thing; being unable to is another. The list of what must never be stored is turned into the thing that builds the database, so a column that would record who spoke to whom is refused rather than reported afterwards. The promise and the mechanism that keeps it are the same file, which means widening what the service may hold announces itself in the same edit.
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GB2619611.3 Pending
Method and system for negotiating a data-retention property between a client device and a server and for selecting a transmission subset in dependence upon the negotiated property
A phone asks the server what it is incapable of keeping before it sends anything, and then sends only the parts it got an acceptable answer for, rather than refusing altogether and being switched off by its owner. The answer is also folded into the key the conversation runs on, so a server that quietly changes its database mid-conversation does not receive the next message at all.
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GB2619612.1 Pending
Method and system for metering consumption of a resource against a periodic per-account allowance without retention of a per-account consumption record
Charging by the minute normally means keeping a tally against your name, and a tally of minutes is a record of when you were on the phone. Here the minutes are issued in advance as tokens that cannot be traced back to the person they were issued to, so the service can hold you to your allowance exactly while holding no record that you made a call.
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GB2619614.7 Pending
Method and system for accountable reporting of a message in a relay which retains no record of the originator or of the reporting party
Somewhere to report abuse is a condition of being in the app stores, and the ordinary way to build one records who complained about whom, which is precisely the thing a private messenger should never hold. Here the sender's own phone seals a tag that only the intended recipient can open, so a report proves who sent the message and the service is never told who reported it.
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GB2619663.4 Pending
Data disclosure control in a verification system
Every system decides how much of your details to hand over by asking how sensitive the field is called. That is the wrong question when the party asking could look it up anyway. Here it turns on what they could have found out without your help, so a fact sitting on a public register is given in full and a fact only you could have proved is answered yes or no and never handed over.
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GB2619665.9 Pending
Verification of a device-computed result in a data processing system
A face check runs on the phone, so all the server ever receives is the word "passed". Signing it proves which phone said it and never that it was true. Here the phone commits to the evidence as it answers, keeps it, and can be asked to produce it at a moment it cannot predict, and whatever was granted on an answer that cannot be produced is taken back.
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GB2619669.1 Pending
Identifier allocation in a namespace
Refuse a name for being too close to a protected one and the alternatives offered are small changes to the same name, which are still too close. Here every suggestion is put back through the rule that refused the request, and the first one offered is the person's own verified name joined to what they asked for, which says who they are rather than imitating somebody else.
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GB2619670.9 Pending
Determining qualifying interactions in a networked system
Referral schemes are gamed by one person holding several accounts and introducing themselves, and every defence is a threshold somebody learns to sit under. Here an introduction counts only when the person introduced deals with somebody the introducer cannot reach by any chain of shared devices, which is the one thing a ring cannot arrange for itself.
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GB2619672.5 Pending
Attendance recording in a verification system
Clocking out proves you were at the door when you said you were leaving, and proves nothing at all about whether you then left. Every system in the field treats arriving and leaving as the same act performed twice. Here a departure is kept as a claim rather than written down as a fact, the phone's own signal is allowed to contradict it when the person is in truth still on site, and that same signal is never allowed to settle the claim or to invent a departure of its own, because a phone is not a person.
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GB2619673.3 Pending
Obtaining an authorisation for a data item in a distributed system
When one service asks another to confirm who you are, the second is told who you are and nothing about what you were agreeing to, so the link between the person and the thing they approved is a line in somebody's database. Here a short code is worked out from the document itself and shown in both places, and the identity service must state which code it put in front of you. Where the two do not match, nothing is issued at all rather than something weaker.
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GB2619674.1 Pending
Entitlement management in a verification system
Proving somebody is old enough happens once, at a moment, and says nothing about who is holding the account an hour later. That gap is why checked accounts are quietly sold and shared. Here the link between the person who was checked and the person now using the account is never written down as settled: signals from the phone are allowed to break that link and never to confirm it, and the permission is attached to unbroken possession rather than to the account, so it cannot be handed on with it.
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GB2619675.8 Pending
Response control in an attribute disclosure system
A company is registered to receive only certain kinds of information about you, and every system polices that by checking what is being asked for. The leak is in the answers rather than the questions: a run of perfectly permitted questions can between them settle something the company was never entitled to hold, and nothing was broken at any point a check was looking at. Here each answer is weighed against everything already given, and refused when the combination would hand over a category outside what the register allows.
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GB2619676.6 Pending
Committing events in a verification system
A log that is committed to a public ledger so nobody can edit it afterwards has to carry two kinds of entry with opposite requirements: registrations that anybody should be able to enumerate, and reliance events that only the party to them should be able to prove. Putting them in separate logs breaks the ordering between them. Here they share one anchored tree, and which class an entry belongs to decides whether it can be listed by anyone or only proved by its party.
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GB2619714.5 Pending
Method and system for atomic settlement of a credential-borne asset across a fiat rail, a public blockchain and a private credential ledger, in which transfer is conditioned upon an affirmative ownership attestation by a biometrically verified holder
Moving an asset that exists in three places at once, a bank rail, a public chain and a private register of credentials, normally means one of them is updated first and the others catch up, which is the window everything goes wrong in. Here none of the three moves unless the holder, checked as a living human being at that moment, affirmatively says the thing is theirs. An absent or refused attestation does not slow the transfer down; it stops it.
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GB2619748.3 Pending
Account enrolment in a verification system
Somebody enrolling with a genuine document that is already attached to another account is the ordinary way one person quietly becomes two. Catching it normally means keeping the face data from every past enrolment and comparing the new one against the pile, which is precisely the store that should not exist. Here the determination is made without that retained evidence being available to it at all.
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GB2619767.3 Pending
Access control in a verification system
A room that has been secured from the inside is a room somebody will shortly need to be let into, and the trade answers that with a key, which works for whoever is holding it and says nothing at all about who they are. Here the check establishes that a living face at this door matches the chip of the document in that person's hand, that they are entitled to this room, and that all of it is true now rather than earlier, and then it does the one thing no access system does: it declines to touch the lock. The answer is shown to the person inside, who decides. There is no wire to cut and no endpoint to compromise, because there is no actuator at all, and the check keeps running while the human takes their time, so an entitlement withdrawn in those seconds leaves the screen before the hand moves.
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GB2620239.0 Pending
Method and system for conditioning production of a cryptographic attestation upon a locally derived continuity verdict, rendering a device unable to assert an identity attestation where continuity is not established
A verification answers who opened the account. It answers nothing at all about who is holding the phone an hour later, and a phone that has been handed over, borrowed or taken still carries a perfectly good one. The obvious fix is to change what the other person sees on screen, except that screen is drawn by software the other person is holding. So this governs what the phone is able to do rather than what it says. The signal that the same person is still there decides whether the key that vouches for them can be opened at all, so when that thread breaks the phone becomes unable to make the claim instead of declining to, and the far end sees a claim stop arriving rather than a comforting one that is no longer true.
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GB2620244.0 Pending
Evidence handling in a verification system
A child, somebody living with dementia, somebody sedated: none of them can work a phone to prove who they are. The trade has two answers for that and both are bad. A carer borrows the person's credential, which nobody afterwards can tell apart from the person acting for themselves, so the guarantee is destroyed in silence. Or the carer speaks for them, which is at least attributable but proves nothing about whether the person was ever in the room. Here the two travel as separate channels that cannot be turned into one another, with no combined score anywhere on the disclosure, so whoever is relying on it can always see which is which. Evidence of the person's own presence comes from the band on their wrist, signed by a key the band withholds the moment it leaves the skin, so a carer holding the band cannot manufacture that evidence by holding it. What the carer is permitted to say then narrows on its own as that evidence weakens, with nobody revoking anything. The carer is never told which line they crossed.
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GB2620245.7 Pending
Attestation scheduling in a constrained device
A battery running down makes a device go quiet. Quiet is the worst thing it can be, because whoever depends on it cannot tell a device conserving power from one that has been taken off, has failed or has been thrown in a drawer. So they carry on believing whatever it last told them, which grows older and less true by the hour. This inverts the trade. The device keeps answering all the way down to its reserve; what shrinks is how much it is willing to claim. It says outright that the reason is power rather than anything about the person or the thing it was fitted to watch. It also reports how long it can keep going at the rate it has picked, a figure nobody else is in a position to work out, so the choice between sending somebody now and waiting until tomorrow rests on a number instead of a guess.
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GB2620246.5 Pending
Method and system for deriving from a live database schema whether a relation path exists between two classes of retained record and for publishing a checkable assertion that two retained facts cannot be correlated
Anything you pay for makes a service remember two things: whose limits went up, and that a payment has been spent. Both are kept deliberately and neither can be dropped, so the promise is not that either is missing, it is that nothing joins them. Saying a column is absent does not show that, because a third table carrying both values would put the two back together while every claim about absent columns carried on passing. This works the real question out from the live database instead, asking whether any route at all connects the two, and it stops making the claim the moment one appears, naming the table that caused it.
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GB2620249.9 Pending
Proximity verification in a challenge-response system
Proving somebody is a live human is solved. Proving they are stood in front of you is not. The gap between the two is a doorway. An attacker at the reader who cannot answer the challenge does not need to: they pass it to an accomplice standing beside the real person, take the answer back and walk in. Every test still passes, because the challenge was unpredictable, a living human answered it and the timing looked human. What fails is that the person who satisfied it was never there. Here the challenge cannot be forwarded, because it never exists as data outside the near-field tap it is derived from. Obtaining it means being inside the field, which is the very thing in question. The window for answering closes with the field too, so a round trip through a second human runs out of time. Answering is a short pattern of presses, which needs no microphone, no camera and no biometric held about the person at all.
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GB2620250.7 Pending
Prompt handling in a monitoring system
Asking somebody how they are produces one answer that two parties want for opposite reasons. The platform needs to know only that a person was awake enough to reply and how long they took. The people responsible for them need to know what was said. Give the platform both and it quietly accumulates a record of the declared state of mind of somebody who frequently cannot consent to that record existing. So the content is sealed to the care network and passes through the platform unread, while the platform takes its signal from the fact of a reply and its latency. Even an escalation carries no reason, because a run of reasons would rebuild the very record the sealing prevented. The prompt itself is then chosen by what this person has actually answered before rather than by what is hardest to fake, which is the part that reads backwards until you sit with it. A strong question nobody answers yields nothing. A weak one they do answer yields something. A question that irritates them ends with the device in a drawer. A device in a drawer yields nothing ever again.
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GB2620256.4 Pending
Media capture in a verification system
You can already prove a photograph came from a real camera and reached you unedited. None of that says the person in it was ever there. So somebody can verify themselves, sign a synthetic video of themselves, and every existing check passes, because the thing that authorised the signature was never the recording. Here the checks on the face are run on frames taken out of the recording itself, and the key that signs is not released unless those frames pass. The signature becomes evidence about the footage rather than a claim attached to it, and anyone holding the file can rerun the check instead of believing it. Separate the two and it collapses back into the ordinary arrangement it was meant to replace.
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GB2620262.2 Pending
Capture session initiation in a verification system
Proving who somebody is and proving where they were are done by different systems that never meet, so the two facts arrive separately and nothing joins the person to the thing they were standing next to. Here scanning the code on the article is what opens the recording at all, the checks on the person run on frames of that recording, and one signature covers the footage and the code together. Without the scan there is no session and nothing to sign, which is what stops footage being taken first and attached to an article afterwards.
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GB2620266.3 Pending
Presence determination in a verification system
The test everybody uses to tell a person from software asks you to perform a task, and a task can be bought. There are businesses that do nothing but pay people to solve them, so a test establishing only that some human somewhere did something is answered by hiring one. Watching the face through the camera does not fix it either, because on a web page nothing stops somebody feeding the camera output with material of their own, and every check then runs on that material. Here a contact is held throughout, and what is examined is whether the response the camera sees arrives at the moment the server asked for it, with the contact unbroken across that moment. Two things arriving by different routes have to stay in step, on a schedule the page cannot know in advance, and letting go ends it with nothing produced. It answers whether a person is there rather than which person, and asks for no identity at all.
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GB2620323.2 Pending
Method and system for establishing the authenticity of a message presented to a reader in a language other than that in which its authenticity was verified
Translating a message on a server means handing the words to somebody else, which is the one thing an encrypted messenger cannot do. Doing it on the phone that receives the message solves that and leaves something quieter behind. The sender signed one set of words. The reader is shown another set, written by their own handset, so the words anybody acts on are words no one signed, while every check on the message still passes. Swap the translation model on a phone and a trusted sender can appear to say something they never said, without touching the sender, the message or anything in between. So the device keeps a record of what it translated from, what came out and which engine produced it, leaves the original a tap away, and can be asked later to produce the same words again and show whether it can.
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GB2621373.6 Pending
Method and system for authorising a pending machine-initiated action
An automated agent that can deploy or delete asks a person to approve a command, and what runs afterwards is not necessarily what was described. The action is proposed by a model, held while an answer is obtained, then executed by something else, and it can be altered in between. Every check in the field is satisfied by that, because each of them ties the approval to a reference to the request rather than to its content, so the approval stays valid while the request changes underneath it. Here the thing about to run is reduced to its exact bytes at the last possible moment and compared against what was put in front of the person, and any difference at all stops it. Alongside that, the things a written procedure forbids are enforced at the same point and cannot be lifted by anybody at the moment of action, however strongly they prove who they are, because the answer was already given when there was time to think about it.
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GB2621375.1 Pending
Method and system for admitting a received frame for retransmission by a radio relay upon presentation of an unlinkable token whose denomination covers the airtime of the retransmission
A long-range radio relay has a few seconds of transmission an hour, because the rules for the band cap how long each transmitter may be on air. Anyone who can make it repeat their messages can use that up for everybody else. Limiting by sender fails because the sender writes its own address. Filtering repeated content fails because changing one byte defeats it. Here every message carries a token issued in advance in a way the issuer cannot later recognise. A relay passes a message on only if that token covers the airtime the relay itself will spend repeating it. Each relay remembers only the tokens it has spent and needs nothing more: the limit applies to each transmitter separately, so a copied token can cost any one relay a single transmission at most. It works with no network connection and without the relay learning who sent anything.
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GB2621378.5 Pending
Proving membership of a set of recipients of an identically delivered data item
A certified email goes to everybody on it as the same message, so there is nowhere to hand each person a proof of their own, and the record kept of who it went to is a list anyone holding it can check a guessed address against. Here the message carries a key rather than a proof. Each recipient uses it with their own address to show anyone that the message was addressed to them, the proof reveals nobody else who received it, and it cannot be used to test for anybody else. The service that certified the message keeps nothing it could use to test an address either.
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GB2621380.1 Pending
Custody recording in a verification system
A custody record is read when something has gone wrong. The question is often who tried to take an item as well as who held it, yet most systems record what they allowed and discard what they refused. An attempt by the wrong party then leaves no trace. Here every decision about an item is numbered in order, refusals included, so a missing one shows as a gap. The record is witnessed by a second system on a public ledger rather than by the one that made the decisions. The owner of an item can then prove to a customer that it went only through permitted hands and that nobody else tried, without revealing the route or which carriers handled it.
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GB2621443.7 Pending
Verification of an identity document using automated comparison and witnessed image capture
Most identity checks give up when a photo will not match. A driving licence photo is often a small engraving taken years ago, so honest people fail. Here a licence is first checked quietly against the passport the person has already proved, allowing for how old and how faint its photo is, with nobody shown the result. Only when that is not enough does a second, already verified person help: their own phone captures the person standing in front of them and the photos are compared out of sight, so the helper never sees either photo. Someone with only a driving licence can join the same way, with their own first face check as the reference.
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GB2621936.0 Pending
Verifying an identity document holder through a second person's device where automated face matching has failed or is inconclusive
When a face check fails, most systems either turn the person away or send the case to a human reviewer. Here the failed check is recorded and starts a different route. A second person who has already been verified is asked to help, and their own phone reads the same document. The second person is checked live against their own record before anything happens, and the document's answer is checked for real rather than trusted. The link the result creates is kept apart from the failed face match and never replaces it. Someone whose only proof came this way cannot then vouch for anyone else, so trust cannot be passed down a chain.
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GB2621940.2 Pending
Enforcing a registered scope of a requesting party in an attribute disclosure system
A service that answers questions about a person can be asked many small questions that are each allowed and that together reveal far more than any one of them should. Here every requester is registered for exactly what it may ask, and how finely. The system keeps track of what it has already answered and refuses a question that, added to the earlier answers, would let the requester work out something outside its registration. The limit applies to what can be worked out from the whole run of answers, not just to each question on its own.
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GB2621941.0 Pending
Age-restricted access control in a verification system
Once someone has proved they are old enough, the fact of their age does not change. What can change is whether the person now using the account is still that person. Here the second point is held as a provisional link rather than a settled one. A signal that cannot say who someone is, such as a change in how the device is used, can only cast doubt on the link and never confirm it. Getting access back needs a fresh check at least as strong as the one that first gave it.
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GB2621945.1 Pending
Admission of an entity lacking cryptographic capability in a verification system
Some things that need to be trusted, such as a vehicle, a craft or a simple device, cannot hold a secret key. Here the thing is tested once when it is enrolled, to learn how it responds to challenges. Later it is given a fresh challenge it has never seen and its response is compared with what was predicted. It is let in only if enough of the verified people who answer for it still stand behind it at that moment. If they withdraw, or their own verification lapses, it stops being admitted.
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GB2622048.3 Pending
Assessing independence of endorsements in a verification system
When several people vouch for something, their vouches only count as separate evidence if the people are truly separate. Two accounts on the same phone are close to one voice. Two people who simply pass through the same building are much less tied. Here the system measures how closely accounts are tied using devices and places it has itself witnessed, ranks a shared device above a shared place, discounts busy places where everyone goes, and counts a tightly tied group as less than a full set of separate voices before deciding whether enough independent people stand behind a request.
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GB2621948.5 Pending
Locating a person within a building in a radio network
In an emergency someone needs to know whether a person is in the building, and on which floor or in which room. The usual answer is a tracker that logs everyone all the time. Here the radio nodes keep nothing about who is attached to them once they lose power, a request to find someone is answered on that person's own phone, and how precise the answer is comes from what the person has agreed to share or, in an emergency, from a registered authority. A check of a whole floor is answered by anonymous tokens that the node only counts.
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GB2622309.9 Pending
Segmented capture signing in a verification system
A long recording is rarely one clean take. Signing the whole file on one check means either rejecting good footage because of one bad moment or vouching for moments nobody checked. Here the recording is signed in segments, each one only if the person in it passes the checks on that segment's own frames, and each signature is tied to the one before it, so anyone holding the file can see exactly which stretches are backed by evidence and nothing can be cut out or reordered without the chain showing it.
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GB2622310.7 Pending
Device signing counter anchoring in a verification system
When a phone that signs footage is found to have been compromised, the usual answer is to distrust everything it signed from the day the problem was discovered. Here the phone's protected hardware counts every signature, puts the count inside each one and regularly lodges the running count with an independent witness, so when a compromise comes to light the point at which it happened is fixed, earlier signatures keep their value and later ones are set aside.
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GB2622308.1 Pending
Position determination in a verification system
A position reported by radio can be faked or relayed from somewhere else, and nothing in the fix itself shows it. Here fixed beacons send both infrared and radio, the device works out where it is from each separately, and the answer is accepted only if the two agree in place and arrive in step, because a relay adds a delay that light and radio cannot both hide. Which beacons pair up and when they send changes every moment on a schedule set by the party asking, so a recording of yesterday's signals proves nothing today.
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GB2622316.4 Pending
Message access in a communication system
Some messages should only be read in a particular room, or only while the sender is physically there. Checking a phone's reported location does not do that, because a location can be faked. Here the key that opens the message is built inside the phone's protected hardware from the same infrared and radio signals that prove where it is, so the message cannot be opened anywhere else, and it closes again when the reader leaves.
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GB2622312.3 Pending
Maintaining the validity of a reference to a leased identity namespace
A Couri booking link presents a Confrmo Name, which is leased rather than owned, so the party behind it can change after the link is issued. Here the link re-checks the name every time it is opened and refuses to serve if the party has changed or the name no longer exists. A separate failure to check at all is kept distinct and is never remembered as a change, so a brief outage cannot permanently suspend a link and a real change of ownership cannot hide behind one.
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GB2622942.7 Pending
Selecting a relay for a call in a communication network
When two phones cannot connect directly, a call goes through a relay. The best relay is the one that suits both callers at once. Finding it usually means each phone testing every relay at the moment the call starts, which slows the call down and tells the network where each caller is. Here each phone measures its connections only now and then in the background. The server works out the best relay for the pair without learning either caller's measurements.
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GB2623330.4 Pending
Controlling access to images in a monitoring system
A Verus Relay in a building can raise the alarm over radio when the internet is cut or a camera or sensor sees an intruder, and the alarm company will want to look. Usually whether they can look is a setting on someone else's server. Here the building's own relay keeps its pictures locked, and the only thing that unlocks them is the signed emergency signal the relay sends over radio, which opens the minutes around the emergency and nothing either side. With no emergency there is nothing anyone can open, and every time the building could be seen is on record in the signals themselves.
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GB2623339.5 Pending
Verifying the movement of goods
A lorry or container can declare its load and its route before it reaches a border, but the declaration only says what the haulier states, and a tracker on the vehicle can be faked or moved. Here Verus Relays on the route, on the ferry and on other shipments travelling the same way act as independent witnesses. The border can only open the declaration if the vehicle really met enough of them along the way, so a load that went where it said passes, and one that did not is the one that gets inspected. The border never needs the vehicle's track.
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GB2623643.0 Pending
Verifying the origin of a call
Calls claiming to be from a bank, a utility or an employer are one of the commonest ways people are defrauded, because the name and number on the screen are whatever the caller chooses. The usual answer is a register: some company keeps the list of who may call on a business's behalf and is asked about every call. Here the customer's own phone checks, during the call, that the caller is verified as a real person and is a current member of a business that controls its web domain. No server holds the staff list, and someone who leaves simply stops being shown as verified.
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GB2624203.2 Pending
Device enrolment in a verification system
A second phone is usually added because a phone that is already on the account approved it. Whoever is holding that phone can add another, whether or not they are the account holder. Here a new device is enrolled only when the person in front of it has just been matched to the passport on the account, and the enrolment belongs to that device. A check done on a different phone, or a recording of an earlier check, does not add it.
Outside software
One mechanical invention, filed through HlinGuard Ltd, and the only entry on this page that is a machine rather than a method.
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GB2619187.4 Pending
Door handle assembly in which an outside lever is decoupled from a latch follower by combined transverse compression and axial displacement of an inside lever
A room is secured from the inside by taking hold of the handle and pulling it, and by nothing else. The keyless alternatives are a button or a thumbturn on the rose, and the objection to those is that a child, a coat or someone leaning on the door can operate them. This needs two movements in two different directions at once, which is exactly what a hand does anyway when it closes on a lever and draws it, so it is quick to do deliberately and cannot be done by any single accident. The inside lever still opens the door in every state of the mechanism, because it is never disconnected from the latch at all.
Where the work started
Five families filed between 2016 and 2020, each one published. Publication fixes a priority date permanently, and three of them have since been cited as prior art in later filings by other companies, including Alipay and a granted United States patent. These earlier applications were not renewed and are not in force, but the disclosures stand, and the line of work runs directly into what is being filed today. The numbers below link to each family's United Kingdom member on the public register, and the WO members are on Espacenet and Google Patents under the numbers as printed.
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WO2017118763A1 Published 2017
System, method and apparatus for data transmission
One-time codes carrying location, time and user identity, used to settle a payment without the terminal round trip.
Later cited by Alipay (Hangzhou) Information Technology, and iCrypto Inc in two filings including granted US11582225B2
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GB2551794A Published 2018
Authentication method & apparatus
Scanning a code on a machine and pairing it with a biometric on a phone before the machine will start.
Later cited by In-Idt, in EP3767917A1 and FR3098948A1
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WO2021156617A1 Published 2021
System and process for validation
A moving sequence of codes rather than one static image, so a photograph of the screen is not enough.
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WO2021156618A1 Published 2021
System and method for recordal of assets
An ownership register with proxy codes, letting a buyer check provenance without being handed the asset identifier itself.
Later cited by China Life Insurance Shanghai Data Center, in granted CN113949627B
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WO2022136858A1 Published 2022
Method of verifying performance of an action in relation to a physical object
Binding a person to a specific physical item and to the act of using it, written during the pandemic against test-result fraud.
Every filing is given with its application number so that anything here can be checked independently, and the figures quoted count only filings on which Louis-James Davis is a named inventor, and titles are reproduced as they appear on the filed specification. A citation means a later applicant or examiner identified the earlier disclosure as relevant to whether their own invention was new; it is not a claim of infringement, licensing or any continuing right. Writing on the problems behind these filings is collected under Insights.
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