Patent ID: 7266569

Claim:
A method of reporting out accumulated metered data from a client to a metering service, each piece of metered data being indexed within a metering database of the client according to a metering ID (MID) and being sub indexed within the metering database according to a content-associated ID (KID), the method comprising the client: selecting a particular MID; selecting at least a portion of the metered data in the metering database having the selected MID, the selected metered data being organized according to KID; constructing a challenge based on the selected metered data; sending the constructed challenge to the metering service, whereby the metering service obtains the metered data from the challenge, stores same, and constructs a response to be returned to the client based on the challenge; receiving the response from the metering service including a list of KIDs of the selected metered data in the challenge; confirming that the response corresponds to the challenge; and processing the list of KIDs in the response by, for each KID in the list, deleting the metered data from the metering database having the selected MID and the KID, wherein the challenge is constructed to include: the MID; an identification of a location of the metering service; a transaction ID (TID) selected for the challenge; and the selected metered data, wherein the selected metered data is encrypted according to a symmetric pass key to result in (pass key(metereddata)), and to further include the pass key encrypted according to a public key (PU-M) of the metering service to result in (PUM(passkey)), whereby the metering service can apply a private key (PR-M) corresponding to (PU-M) to (PU-M(passkey)) from the challenge to obtain the pass key, can apply the obtained pass key to (pass key(metereddata)) from the challenge to obtain the metered data, and can then store the obtained metered data.