US Patent Issued to Utah State University on Oct. 7 for "Communicating securely between network nodes" (Utah, Idaho Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 8 -- United States Patent no. 12,438,854, issued on Oct. 7, was assigned to Utah State University (Logan, Utah).

"Communicating securely between network nodes" was invented by Jeffrey Jay Johnson (Logan, Utah) and Robert Foster Houghton (Pocatello, Idaho).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "For communicating securely between network nodes, a method transmits a port knock sequence comprising ordered empty protocol packets from an origination node to a destination Internet Protocol (IP) address of a destination node. The port knock sequence encodes at least one vocabulary phrase. The method transmits the length of the at least one vocabulary phrase to first and second helper nod...