ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 4 -- United States Patent no. 12,321,466, issued on June 3, was assigned to International Business Machines Corp. (Armonk, N.Y.).

"Database hierarchical encryption for hybrid-cloud environment" was invented by Zhe Hua Peng (Beijing), Peng Hui Jiang (Beijing), Ting Yin (Beijing), Jun Su (Beijing) and Feng Zhang (Beijing).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Techniques for hierarchical encryption for data storage are disclosed, in one or more embodiments. These techniques include parsing an electronic database storage request, based on the syntax of the request, to identify a plurality of request elements and determining, using one or more trained machine learning (ML) models, on...