Protecting intellectual property using digital signatures

Abstract

Methods of protecting intellectual property using digital signatures include generating reference digital signatures of first content, generating a digital signature of second content, comparing the digital signature of the second content to the reference digital signatures to identify matching reference digital signatures, and selectively performing an action based on the matching reference digital signatures and a policy. The first content may include proprietary information of an organization and/or posts of a machine-learning (ML) model. The second content may include source code intercepted from a transmission directed to an external site, such as a ML model, and/or source code saved to a source code repository. Actions may include, without limitation, initiating an audit of the second content, sending a notification to a user interface indicating that the second content likely contains a portion of the first content, releasing the transmission, and/or terminating the transmission.