Cali company accuses Amazon of infringing patent for cryptographic sessions

One of the world’s largest online retailers was recently named in an East Texas patent infringement lawsuit, which centers on tech to keep cloud data secured.

ZitoVault, a California company, filed suit against Amazon.com and its subsidiaries on Monday, March 2 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division. Bazaarvoice and Gearbox Software are also named as defendants.

ZitoVault is focused on securing the digital communications among people, applications and the cloud, the company’s website states, adding that part of the technology ZitoVault uses is patent protected.

According to the complaint for patent infringement, on Nov. 19, 2002, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued patent No. 6,484,257, entitled “System and Method for Maintaining N Number of Simultaneous Cryptographic Sessions Using a Distributed Computing Environment.”

The ’257 patent generally covers systems and methods for that provide a scalable way to maintain a number of cryptographic sessions.

Amazon allegedly offers products and services that infringe upon the patent, including Amazon Web Services, Elastic Cloud Compute, EC2, Virtual Private Cloud, VPC, Elastic Load Balancing, AutoScaling, and Elastic Beanstalk.

“Amazon and its customers can use the Accused Amazon Services to maintain a number of cryptographic sessions with employees and members of the customer or with other end-users,” the suit states.

“For example, Amazon and its customers can use Amazon Web Services to host computing applications that users may connect to via a VPN, SSL/TLS, or other secure connection. Amazon scalably maintains cryptographic sessions with such computing applications on computers in its data centers in the United States.”

The other two defendants in the suit, Bazaarvoice and Gearbox, are accused of using Amazon services to scalably maintain cryptographic sessions.

ZitoVault is seeking injunctive relief, an award of an ongoing licensing fee and court costs, including attorney’s fees.

Attorney Bradley Caldwell of the Dallas law firm Caldwell Cassady & Curry represents the company.

Case No. 6:15-cv-00152-JRG