Court Opinion

ID: 9946177
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2024-02-29 16:02:32.202791+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:25:29.904689
License: Public Domain

Case: 22-2034    Document: 41    Page: 1   Filed: 02/22/2024

        NOTE: This disposition is nonprecedential.

   United States Court of Appeals
       for the Federal Circuit
                 ______________________

                INTEL CORPORATION,
                      Appellant

                            v.

            KONINKLIJKE PHILIPS N.V.,
                      Appellee
               ______________________

                  2022-2034, 2022-2035
                 ______________________

     Appeals from the United States Patent and Trademark
 Office, Patent Trial and Appeal Board in Nos. IPR2021-
 00327, IPR2021-00370.
                  ______________________

                Decided: February 22, 2024
                 ______________________

    CHRISTINA JORDAN MCCULLOUGH, Perkins Coie LLP,
 Seattle, WA, argued for appellant. Also represented by
 LORI ANN GORDON, NATHAN K. KELLEY, Washington, DC;
 TARA LAUREN KURTIS, Chicago, IL.

     PETER F. SNELL, Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky
 and Popeo, PC, New York, NY, argued for appellee. Also
 represented by WILLIAM MEUNIER, MICHAEL RENAUD, Bos-
 ton, MA.
                 ______________________
Case: 22-2034     Document: 41     Page: 2    Filed: 02/22/2024

 2              INTEL CORPORATION v. KONINKLIJKE PHILIPS N.V.

     Before PROST, TARANTO, and CHEN, Circuit Judges.
 CHEN, Circuit Judge.
      Intel Corporation (Intel) filed two petitions for inter
 partes review of several claims of U.S. Patent No. 9,436,809
 (’809 patent). These petitions challenged the claims for be-
 ing unpatentable as obvious over two distinct combinations
 of references: (1) Menezes 1 in view of Brands-Chaum, 2 and
 (2) OCPS 3 in view of Brands-Chaum. The Board’s final
 written decisions found that Intel had failed to show by a
 preponderance of the evidence that the challenged claims
 were unpatentable. Intel appeals these decisions, and we
 have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(4)(A). We af-
 firm.
     First, we reject Intel’s argument that the Board failed
 to address the unpatentability grounds as articulated in
 the petitions. According to Intel, rather than considering
 whether it would have been obvious to incorporate the
 broad distance-measurement concept allegedly taught in
 Brands-Chaum into Menezes’s or OCPS’s authentication
 protocol, the Board’s final written decisions reversed the
 references—evaluating whether it would have been

     1   ALFRED J. MENEZES ET AL., HANDBOOK OF APPLIED
 CRYPTOGRAPHY (1997).
     2   Stefan Brands & David Chaum, Distance-Bound-
 ing Protocols, EUROCRYPT ’93, 344–59 (1994).
     3   Open Copy Protection System, Philips Research
 Proposal to Broadcast Protection Discussion Group, Ver-
 sion 1.4 (May 7, 2002); OCPS Compliance and Robustness
 Rules (May 7, 2002). In this opinion, “OCPS” refers to two
 separate documents describing the Open Copy Protection
 System protocol. The parties do not dispute that OCPS can
 be treated as a single publication, i.e., as a single primary
 reference.
Case: 22-2034    Document: 41      Page: 3    Filed: 02/22/2024

 INTEL CORPORATION v. KONINKLIJKE PHILIPS N.V.              3

 obvious to modify Brands-Chaum’s specific example of a
 distance-bounding protocol to use Menezes’s or OCPS’s
 multi-bit message. We disagree. The Board expressly
 acknowledged that Intel’s proposed combinations involved
 timing Menezes’s and OCPS’s multi-bit challenge-response
 exchanges to calculate a distance between devices or en-
 force a distance limit. J.A. 17–18, 29; J.A. 47. The Board
 then found that transmitting multiple bits, instead of a sin-
 gle bit, would have resulted in an inaccurate distance
 measurement and would have impaired security. J.A. 21,
 31; J.A. 57. In other words, the Board correctly understood
 the proposed combinations and identified deficiencies asso-
 ciated with these combinations. The Board’s final written
 decisions thus squarely addressed the obviousness theories
 advanced in the petitions.
      Second, substantial evidence supports the Board’s de-
 termination that Brands-Chaum’s teachings are incompat-
 ible with Menezes’s and OCPS’s multi-bit exchanges. The
 Board emphasized that Intel did not reconcile the conflict
 between Menezes’s and OCPS’s disclosures directed to
 multi-bit exchanges and Brands-Chaum’s disclosure that
 an “essential element” of its distance-bounding protocol
 “consists of a single-bit challenge and rapid single-bit re-
 sponse.” J.A. 3212 (emphases added); see J.A. 23, 31–32;
 J.A. 59. The Board further found that timing a multi-bit
 message would result in unwanted delays and that such
 delays would impair security, crediting Intel’s expert testi-
 mony explaining that (1) Brands-Chaum’s prover device
 immediately responds to a challenge so that propagation
 delay dominates the time being timed by a verifier device,
 (2) propagation delay has an “iron-clad relationship be-
 tween distance and time,” (3) sending a multi-bit message
 takes longer than sending a single-bit message, and (4) an
 unwanted delay of just nanoseconds could cause a message
 to travel meters. J.A. 21–22, 31–32, 32 n.19; J.A. 57–59, 59
 n.13. This amounts to substantial evidence for the Board’s
 determination that transmitting a multi-bit message
Case: 22-2034     Document: 41     Page: 4   Filed: 02/22/2024

 4              INTEL CORPORATION v. KONINKLIJKE PHILIPS N.V.

 would create unwanted delays, which in turn would render
 the distance measurement inaccurate and impair security.
 We see no reason on this record to disturb the Board’s find-
 ings that Brands-Chaum’s teachings are incompatible with
 Menezes’s and OCPS’s multi-bit authentication protocols.
      We have considered Intel’s remaining arguments—in-
 cluding Intel’s contention that the Board should have found
 a motivation to combine notwithstanding the delay and se-
 curity issues associated with timing a multi-bit message—
 and find them unpersuasive. For the foregoing reasons, we
 affirm.
                         AFFIRMED