U.S. Patent 10382485 was awarded to VMware, Inc. on August 13, 2019 and is entitled “Blockchain-assisted public key infrastructure for internet of things applications.” The first named inventor is Jong-Ho Won of Palo Alto, CA. The abstract contains an overview of the patent disclosure:

An approach is disclosed for registering and authenticating Internet of things (IoT) devices. In one embodiment, an installation device receives, from an IoT device, an identifier (ID) and a hash of a public key, where the IoT device itself generates the ID, the public key, and a private key. To register the IoT device, a blockchain wallet in the installation devices generates a blockchain transaction which adds the received ID and hash of the public key as a name and value pair in a name/value storage (NVS). The hash of the public key may then be retrieved from the NVS and used in authentication of the IoT device to other IoT devices or servers, among other things. Link to Full Patent

This blockchain patent was originally filed on February 13, 2017  as U.S. Patent Application 15/431138 at the United Stated Patent and Trademark Office. The application was them awarded a patent grant and published as U.S. Patent 10382485. The primary examiner was Techane Gergiso.

VMware, Inc., who is the original assignee of this patent, has at least 3429 total granted patents in the United States as of the date of this article. This blockchain patent has been cited 1 times by other U.S. patents according to our law firm research, and can be considered an innovative patent in the field of cryptocurrency and blockchain.

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