Patent ID: 8521874

Claim:
A method for determining the similarity of a test person to a reference person, the method comprising: receiving an accumulation of single reversible hashes that represent multiple items of system information pertaining to a test computer device that has been used by the test person, wherein each single reversible hash includes multiple reversible hashes of data elements representing characteristics of the test computer device, each characteristics selected from a group consisting essentially of: a hardware component, a hardware configuration, a software component, a software configuration, and a usage of the test computer device; parsing each single reversible hash into its constituent multiple reversible hashes; parsing the constituent multiple reversible hashes; initializing a correlation score representing a measure of correlation between the test computer device and a reference computer device associated with the reference person; identifying, for each of the constituent multiple reversible hashes, one or more corresponding items of system information of the reference computer device, wherein the corresponding items each correspond to at least one of the data elements representing characteristics of the test computer device; for each of the corresponding items: comparing the corresponding item to the at least one of the data element to determine a degree of similarity between the corresponding item and the at least one data element; and adjusting a correlation score according to the degree of similarity; and determining a measure of similarity between the test person and the reference person according to the adjusted correlation score.