Container Image Signing Patents: Leaders vs. Long Tail 2026
Filing growth compares 2021 (1,317 records) with 2024 (1,101) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 18,577 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What the container image signing patent landscape covers
Container image signing sits at the intersection of software supply-chain security and distributed systems infrastructure — verifying that a container image has not been tampered with before it is pulled, built, or deployed. This landscape draws on 18,577 published records filed or published between 2015 and mid-2026, matched against the topic through direct terminology and combinations of container, image and signing concepts. The scope is broad by design: it captures not only dedicated signing and attestation mechanisms but also the surrounding infrastructure claims — key management, registry trust models, and policy enforcement — that determine whether a signing scheme is enforceable in practice.
Because publication lags filing by roughly eighteen months, the most recent one to two years in any trend understate real filing activity; 2024 is the last year that can be treated as materially complete, and everything after it should be read as a floor rather than a final count.
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Filing trends and technology composition
Two views matter here: how filing volume has moved year over year, and which technical classes carry the claim density. Both are drawn directly from the records in scope, with no recomputation.
Filing activity peaked in 2020, then eased off a high plateau
Volume rose from 1,180 records in 2017 to a peak of 1,380 in 2020. The fully-countable span from 2021 (1,317) to 2024 (1,101) shows a -16% move — a real but moderate pull-back from peak, not a collapse. Years from 2025 onward are still filling in as publications catch up to filing dates, so they should not be read as a continued decline.
G06F and H04L dominate; commerce and wireless classes trail well behind
Electric digital data processing (G06F) appears in 50.1% of the 18,577 records in scope, and digital information transmission (H04L) in 39.3% — the two form the technical core of image signing and verification. Business/commerce data processing (G06Q) sits at 20.7%, with wireless networks (H04W), pictorial communication (H04N) and data recognition (G06K) each in the high single digits. Because records commonly carry multiple IPC classes, these shares sum to well over 100% and should be read individually against the full record count, not against one another as a closed pie.
Shares are the percentage of the 18,577 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Containers & Orchestration: Container Image Signing Patent Landscape with Eureka
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Try EurekaThe most-cited records and a representative recent filing
US20190311021A1 — Systems and methods to improve a technological process for signing documents (DocuSign, 2019-10-10)
The filing describes a system that parses a PDF using a signature tag marker element to generate logical text block elements, pairs those elements to the marker by proximity, then generates markup language information used to render a responsive markup language image on a client device for signing.This is a document-signing workflow claim set, not container-image cryptographic signing — useful as a marker of how broadly the search string's 'signing' term pulls in adjacent, non-container document workflows.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US5892900A | Systems and methods for secure transaction management and electronic rights protection | 6,075 |
| 2 | US6850252B1 | Intelligent electronic appliance system and method | 4,059 |
| 3 | US6226618B1 | Electronic content delivery system | 3,070 |
| 4 | US20090276771A1 | Globally Distributed Utility Computing Cloud | 2,863 |
| 5 | US20090254572A1 | Digital information infrastructure and method | 2,827 |
| 6 | US20160012465A1 | System and method for distributing, receiving, and using funds or credits and apparatus thereof | 2,564 |
| 7 | US20120069131A1 | Reality alternate | 2,111 |
| 8 | US20140201126A1 | Methods and Systems for Applications for Z-numbers | 1,970 |
| 9 | US5765152A | System and method for managing copyrighted electronic media | 1,935 |
| 10 | US20080004904A1 | Systems and methods for providing interoperability among healthcare devices | 1,924 |
Citation counts favour older, foundational filings within a searched corpus — treat them as a signal of influence on later work, not as a ranking of current commercial relevance.
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Browse MCP servers →What the concentration and citation data signal
Three patterns stand out once the ranking, the trend and the citation table are read together.
The lead is real but not dominant
The ranked leader holds 927 records and the top five combined take 15.2% of all 18,577 records in scope — a discernible lead, but well short of the kind of near-monopoly concentration seen in narrower, younger technology fields. The top ten extends to 24.0%, meaning three-quarters of the field sits outside the most active ten filers.
Past-peak, not in decline
Volume peaked in 2020 at 1,380 records and the fully-complete 2021-to-2024 span shows a -16% move. That is a pull-back from a high point, not a field losing relevance — and the years after 2024 are still filling in as publication catches up with filing.
Two classes carry the technical weight
Electric digital data processing and digital information transmission between them touch the large majority of records, consistent with signing and verification logic sitting at the software and transport layers rather than in a single specialised class.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to containers & orchestration: container image signing patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
| Assignee | Co-assignee | Shared families |
|---|---|---|
| Silverbrook Research Pty Ltd | SILVEBROOK KIA | 20 |
| iControl Networks, Inc. | SUNDERMEYER KEN | 10 |
| iControl Networks, Inc. | FULKER JIM | 10 |
| International Business Machines Corporation | IBM DEUTSCHLAND GMBH | 10 |
| Intertrust Technologies Corporation | MAHER DAVID P | 9 |
| International Business Machines Corporation | International Business Machines (China) Co., Ltd. | 9 |
| Silverbrook Research Pty Ltd | Chantic Corporation | 8 |
| Silverbrook Research Pty Ltd | LAPSTUN PAUL | 8 |
Only 10 co-assignee pairs appear in the corpus, and the strongest of those ties back to unrelated older filings rather than active container-signing collaboration — cross-company joint filing is not yet a feature of this field.
Where to take this analysis
The dataset points to a field with a moderate leader, a long tail of single- or few-filing entrants, and technical weight concentrated in two IPC classes rather than a specialised signing-only classification.
Map the white space inside G06F and H04L
With over half the corpus sitting in electric digital data processing and two-fifths in digital information transmission, the open ground is more likely to be in specific sub-claims — key rotation policy, registry-side enforcement, attestation chaining — than in an unclaimed adjacent class.
Explore white space in EurekaWatch the ranked leader's claim scope, not just its count
927 records at the top of the ranking is a volume signal; it does not by itself say whether those filings block a specific implementation route. Pull the leader's claims directly before assuming freedom to operate is constrained.
Review leader claims in EurekaRe-check 2025–2026 filings once they mature
Publication lag means the last one to two years of this trend will revise upward. A field that looks past-peak today may look flat once those records finish publishing.
Track filing trends in EurekaCommon questions about container image signing patents
The dataset used for this landscape contains 18,577 published records in scope, covering filings and publications from 2015 through mid-2026. This figure counts patent families in the assignee ranking, not raw document duplicates across jurisdictions. Because the search string also captures adjacent terminology combinations, not every record is a dedicated container-signing invention — some reflect broader document or data-signing workflows that overlap with the search terms.
The ranking covers 100 companies, with the leader holding 927 records and the top five combined accounting for 15.2% of all 18,577 records in scope. That is a discernible lead but not a dominant one — the top ten extends to only 24.0% of the field, meaning most activity sits outside the most active filers. Reviewers should treat this as a ranked leaderboard rather than a definitive top-50 or top-100 list, since it reflects however many companies the underlying data returns.
Filing peaked in 2020 at 1,380 records and the fully-complete span from 2021 to 2024 shows a -16% move, from 1,317 down to 1,101. That reads as a pull-back from a high point rather than an outright decline, and it should not be extended into 2025 or 2026: publication lags filing by roughly eighteen months, so the most recent years in any trend chart are still filling in and will revise upward as more records publish.
The two dominant IPC classes are G06F (electric digital data processing), covering 50.1% of the 18,577 records in scope, and H04L (digital information transmission), covering 39.3%. Business and commerce data processing (G06Q) appears in 20.7% of records, with wireless networking, pictorial communication and data recognition classes each present in the high single digits. Records frequently carry more than one class, so these percentages sum to well over 100% and should each be read against the full record count rather than against each other.
US20190311021A1, the representative filing from DocuSign referenced in this landscape, claims a system for parsing PDF documents and rendering signature markup for document signing workflows — it is not a container-image cryptographic signing claim. Anyone building container image signing infrastructure should read this filing as evidence of how broadly the search terminology pulls in adjacent document-signing inventions, not as a direct freedom-to-operate concern for registry or attestation-based signing schemes. A dedicated claims review against the specific implementation route is still the reliable way to check exposure.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.