In an effort to make educational resources around the history of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology and development readily available to the industry, the DPI Consortium website was created. The mission of this independent database has been to provide easy access to hard-to-find historical information relevant to patent validity challenges with the secondary goal of encouraging innovation in the area of DPI, deterring patent litigation, and improving patent quality.
The DPI Consortium has long envisioned this website as a living/breathing compendium of information that is regularly updated and expanded. The Consortium encourages interested parties to add to the prior art repository for the benefit of all interested parties.
The following is a summary of the latest educational efforts by the Consortium, as well as new resources that have been added to the website:
Patent Examiner Technical Training
As part of its vital educational mission, the DPI Consortium recently presented training sessions to USPTO examiners, who are skilled in the deep packet inspection arts. The first session was offered through the USPTO Technical Training Program. The overwhelming success of this session resulted in an invitation to participate in the USPTO Technology Fair, where NETSCOUT’s Andrew Cockburn presented on DDoS detection and mitigation, and Jerry Mancini presented on DPI for Cybersecurity. Their presentations and materials are currently available on the DPI Consortium website. Several hundred patent examiners attended each of the Patent Examiner Technical Training Program presentations and the Tech Fair training presentations.
Prior Art Database Expanded
In keeping with the Consortium’s efforts to expand its curated prior art database, significant new additions have been made to the repository. These are non-patent materials that are generally not easily found in the public domain, if at all. Most have been contributed by preeminent Advisory Board members from their personal collections of operating manuals or similar sources. Each of the new prior art materials can now be easily searched for, and found in the DPI Consortium Zotero database, accessible through the website.
Another addition to the website is a glossary of terms and acronyms prepared by Advisory Board member, Tim O’Neill, a senior member of the IEEE and longtime deep packet inspection and network analysis expert. The glossary contains over three hundred acronyms with detailed definitions, which are sure to be helpful for interested parties at all levels of expertise.
Additional updates to our DPI Consortium Zotero Prior Art database include documents on topics related to telephony signaling, signaling System 7, technical reference guides, study guides, and operating manuals for legacy testing equipment dated between 1966 and 1989 from:
- Hewlett Packard
- Bell Systems
- GN Elmi
- Harris Dracon Division
- Mandrel Industries
- Digitech.
In addition, six end-of-life documents published between 2012 and 2016, containing deployment, reference, and installation manuals for SteelCentral and Cascade Pilot products within Riverbed Technologies have been added to the database.
Also, 23 new links and one document from Network General, published between 1990 and 1996, covering technical specifications, product features, and updates related to deep packet inspection have been added to the database. These documents include operation, installation, and reference manuals for products, such as Sniffer, Telesniffer, and SniffMaster. They provide troubleshooting information for TCP/IP, Ethernet, and Token Ring, as well as protocol network analysis materials.
A number of technical bulletins have been added to Zotero, including product documents from IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Xerox published between 2006 through 2024. These documents include technical specifications, product features, and updates related to deep packet inspection.
Lastly, twenty open-source projects have been added to the database. These include well-known packet analysis tools, such as Wireshark and tcpdump, firewall projects, the Zeek/Bro and Suricata intrusion detection systems (IDS), and network-based security vulnerability analytics tools.
The DPI Consortium remains committed to maintaining a robust collection of invaluable resources on DPI in order to support the continued use and growth of this vital technology.