United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ______________________

APPLE INC., Appellant

v.

MPH TECHNOLOGIES OY, Appellee ______________________

2021-1532, 2021-1533, 2021-1534 ______________________

Appeals from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Patent Trial and Appeal Board in Nos. IPR2019- 00823, IPR2019-00824, IPR2019-00826. ______________________

Decided: March 9, 2022 ______________________

JOSEPH R. PALMORE, Morrison & Foerster LLP, Wash- ington, DC, argued for appellant. Also represented by SETH W. LLOYD, BRIAN ROBERT MATSUI; LENA HUGHES; New York, NY; RICHARD HUNG, San Francisco, CA; BITA RAHEBI, Los Angeles, CA.

BRIAN ERIK HAAN, Lee Sheikh Megley & Haan LLC, Chicago, IL, argued for appellee. Also represented by ASHLEY E. LAVALLEY, CHRISTOPHER LEE, RICHARD BURNS MEGLEY, JR.; JAMES CARMICHAEL, STEPHEN TERRY SCHREINER, Carmichael IP, PLLC, Tysons Corner, VA. ______________________ Case: 21-1532 Document: 46 Page: 2 Filed: 03/09/2022

2 APPLE INC. v. MPH TECHNOLOGIES OY

Before MOORE, Chief Judge, PROST and TARANTO, Circuit Judges. MOORE, Chief Judge. Apple appeals from three Patent Trial and Appeal Board inter partes review final written decisions collec- tively holding Apple failed to show claims 2, 4, 9, and 11 of U.S. Patent No. 9,712,494; claims 7–9 of U.S. Patent No. 9,712,502; and claims 3, 5, 10, and 12–16 of U.S. Patent No. 9,838,362 would have been obvious. For the following rea- sons, we affirm. BACKGROUND I The challenged patents share a written description and purport to improve secure messaging between arbitrary hosts (e.g., messaging across local area networks (LANs), private and public wide area networks (WANs), or the in- ternet) utilizing Internet Protocol (IP) security protocols. ’494 patent at 1:54–57; 7:38–45. 1 IP security protocols re- quire establishing a security association, id. at 2:39–49, that costs computation time and increases network la- tency, id. at 4:44–45. They are purportedly designed for static connections and, thus, not well suited for communi- cations with mobile computers, leading to poor quality of service for communication over wireless links. Id. at 4:39– 43; 5:7–14. To solve these problems, systems commonly utilize an intermediate host that facilitates communication between a mobile terminal and its communication target (e.g., a security gateway). Id. at 5:15–6:14. These common solutions, however, heavily rely on a concept known as tun- neling. In tunneling, typically an entire data packet, in- cluding its outer header, is encapsulated and a new outer

1 For simplicity, we cite to the ’494 patent. Case: 21-1532 Document: 46 Page: 3 Filed: 03/09/2022

APPLE INC. v. MPH TECHNOLOGIES OY 3

header is added. Id. at 3:21–49. The use of tunneling in the known solutions can cause extra packet size overhead, or require the intermediate computer to decrypt the packet, which could cause potential security problems. Id. at 6:21– 24. The patents disclose a method for secure forwarding of a message from a first computer to a second computer via an intermediate computer in a telecommunication network that purportedly avoids these disadvantages. Id. at Ab- stract; 6:28–31. Preferably, a first computer “processes [a] formed message using a security protocol and encapsulates the message at least in an outer IP header,” which is sent to an intermediate computer. Id. at 6:54–59. The interme- diate computer “matches the outer IP header address fields together with a unique identif