Intellectual Property Rights Policy

Covenant

GLACIS Technologies, Inc. irrevocably covenants not to assert any patent claim it owns or controls that is necessarily infringed by implementing the OVERT standard, against any person or entity making, using, selling, offering to sell, importing, or distributing an implementation of the standard. This covenant applies to any such implementation whether or not it claims or achieves conformance, whether the implementation is commercial or non‑commercial, whether complete or partial, and whether the attestation capabilities defined in the standard are combined into a unified pipeline or implemented separately.

The covenant is irrevocable, runs with the patents, and is binding on GLACIS Technologies and its successors and assigns. The sole condition is defensive: it terminates as to any person or entity that asserts, or voluntarily participates in asserting, a patent claim against GLACIS Technologies, its successors, or its assigns — affecting only the asserting party, and remaining in full force as to everyone else.

This covenant covers the compositions described in the patent filings below, including any subset embodiment, to the extent practiced in any implementation of a version of the OVERT standard published by GLACIS Technologies or a successor registry maintainer.

GLACIS Technologies holds the following patent filings related to methods described in the OVERT standard. All filings are U.S. provisional patent applications.

What is not claimed

The individual cryptographic primitives referenced in OVERT (SHA‑256, Ed25519, BLS12‑381, HMAC‑SHA256, CBOR, Merkle trees, etc.) are open standards. No GLACIS patent claim covers these primitives individually.

What is claimed

The patent claims cover compositions of methods — specific architectures that combine configuration binding, sampling control, statistical signal computation, drift attribution, spawn authorization, and related techniques into integrated attestation systems. The claims are written around these compositions, including functionally equivalent algorithms and alternative constructions achieving the same operational effect, and are not limited to the specific cryptographic primitives or parameter choices described in any single Protocol Profile.

What this means for implementers

Any implementation of a published version of the OVERT standard is covered by the royalty‑free covenant in Section 1 above — whether or not it claims or achieves conformance, and regardless of which architectural approach or cryptographic constructions it uses. The patent claims exist to prevent unlicensed use of the described compositions outside the OVERT standard, not to restrict implementations of it.

The normative requirements of the OVERT standard — including the attestation envelope structure, conformance levels, auditor verification procedures, and agentic governance controls — define functional properties and interoperability requirements. They do not mandate the use of any specific patented method. Conformance can be achieved through multiple architectural approaches.

Organizations developing alternative Protocol Profiles or independent implementations that do not conform to a published version of the OVERT standard are advised to conduct their own freedom‑to‑operate analysis. The presence of a registered Protocol Profile in the OVERT registry does not constitute a representation that the profile is free of third‑party intellectual property encumbrances.

Contributors to the OVERT standard who are aware of potentially essential patent claims — whether held by GLACIS Technologies or by third parties — are expected to disclose them. Disclosure should be directed to overt‑[email protected].

Protocol Profile registration, conformance criteria, and certification are governed by published, rule-based process rather than by discretion. The requirements for each conformance level, the registration process, the self-declaration fallback, and the mandatory conformance test suites are specified in the OVERT standard (Section 22.6), and self-declared profiles are barred from Level 3 and Level 4 conformance claims. Glacis Technologies is the current steward and maintainer. OVERT is on a defined path to multi-stakeholder stewardship: Glacis is establishing co-stewardship with domain partners and intends to formalize an independent, multi-party governance body that no single entity, Glacis included, can control. Until that body is constituted, governance follows the published process above together with the irrevocable royalty-free covenant in Section 1, both of which bind the steward.

Multiple Protocol Profiles are permitted under OVERT. Conformance requires exactly one declared Protocol Profile per deployment; registration requirements are level‑dependent (OVERT Section 22.6), and Levels 3 and 4 require a registered profile. Self‑declared profiles are barred from Level 3 and Level 4 conformance claims (see OVERT Section 22.6.3).

The Protocol Profile registry, conformance criteria, and certification governance are designed to prevent single‑entity control and are governed by published, rule-based process rather than by discretion. Registry governance procedures, including timelines, self‑declaration fallback, and mandatory conformance test suites, are specified in the OVERT standard (Section 22.6), with Glacis Technologies serving as the current steward on a defined path to multi-stakeholder stewardship.

For questions about this IPR policy, patent disclosures, or the royalty‑free covenant: