Patent attributes
Embodiments provide traceability of edits to a document, i.e., a verifiable and immutable provenance chain for the document. Systems and methods enable traceability of edits, by encoding, for states of the document, a fingerprint (e.g., a cryptographic hash of the document's contents) and an edit history within a block written to a distributed ledger (e.g., a blockchain). The ledger is maintained via a self-organizing peer-to-peer distributed ledger network. Once added to the ledger, the contents of a block (e.g., the document's fingerprint and edit history) are immutable and the integrity of the edit history encoded in the ledger is secure. The algorithm that generates the fingerprint is sensitive to edits of the document. The non-corruptible fingerprint encoded in the ledger is employable to detect any edits that are not included in the encoded edit history and/or inconsistent with a currently available version of the document.
