US Patent 10917239 Policy-enabled encryption keys having ephemeral policies

Apparatus and methods for evaluating an encryption key based on policies for a policy operation, including, but not limited to, aggregating existing policies for evaluating at least one key attribute of the encryption key, executing a policy replacement operation replacing at least one existing policy with at least one ephemeral policy, and evaluating the at least one key attribute based, at least in part, on the at least one ephemeral policy.