ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,317,169, issued on May 27, was assigned to Ruckus IP Holdings LLC (Clarement, New Caledonia).

"Protected pre-association station identification" was invented by Kurt A Lumbatis (Dacula, Ga.) and Mark Hamilton (Superior, Colo.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods, systems, and computer readable media can be operable to facilitate an exchange of messages between an access point and a station, wherein the access point requests a unique identifier from the station. The station initiates a secure connection with the access point prior to associating with the access point. The station may either respond with a message declining to provide a ...