February 17, 2007
Jordan, patents, and hacking
It’s taken us a while to get this posted, but on Jan. 22, our adviser, Jordan Wiens, published an article in Networking Computing titled “Mirage and the USPTO: Patently Ridiculous.”
Can you patent a hack? The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office seems to think so. Mirage Networks has been granted patent No. 7,124,197 for its description of techniques such as ARP poisoning to control access to protected network devices.
But ARP poisoning, which lets one host intercept traffic intended for another, isn’t a new idea. In fact, it predates Mirage’s patent application (filed in 2002) by at least five years
