Case: Patents/Obviousness (P.T.A.B.)

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board said that challenged claims of Centripetal Networks Inc.'s patent that describes a packet-filtering system configured to filter packets in accordance with packet-filtering rules are unpatentable as obvious over prior art, in an inter partes review by Palo Alto Networks Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., and Keysight Technologies Inc. The board said that the challenged claims are obvious over various combinations of prior art, including prior art that describes stateless packet filtering firewalls that inspect the individual packets themselves and apply rules based on the inspected packets, and that discloses a system for packet filtering of ...