The most defensible place to keep a cryptographic key is inside the chip that uses it, never exposed to software at all. Move the key off-die — into firmware, into the OS, into a config file — and you have multiplied the ways it can leak. On-die key management is the hardware-security ideal: the secret is born, lives, and is used inside silicon that resists physical extraction.
US12113786B2, “Secure feature and key management in integrated circuits,” granted to Cryptography Research, Inc. on October 8, 2024, claims exactly that on-chip discipline. Classified under G06F 21/71 (protecting hardware) with a stack of key-management codes, it covers managing keys and securely enabling chip features on the silicon.
The inventor line is worth pausing on: Paul Kocher is among the names. Kocher is one of the most consequential figures in applied hardware security — differential power analysis, SSL/TLS work, later co-discovery of Spectre. A key-management-on-chip patent from his group carries the presumption of being grounded in deep side-channel and hardware-attack realism, not abstraction.
The “feature management” half of the claim is the commercially clever part. Modern chips ship with capabilities that vendors want to enable, disable, or license selectively — and doing that securely requires the same cryptographic machinery as key management: authenticated, tamper-resistant control over what the silicon will and will not do. Binding feature enablement to on-chip keys ties the business model to the hardware root of trust.
Per the desk's rules: issued grant (B2), not an application; a hardware-method claim, not a product announcement. Cryptography Research (now part of Rambus) licenses exactly this kind of hardware-security IP widely, which is the commercial context — their business is being licensed into other people's chips.
For the reader mapping the field, this is a reminder that key management is not only a cloud and software problem. At the bottom of the stack, the question is where a key physically lives, and the most durable answer — inside tamper-resistant silicon, never exposed — has its own dense, expert patent landscape that everything above it ultimately rests on.