Cryptographic identity, file lineage, and verifiable authorship proof — entirely on your machine. No cloud. No accounts. No expiry.
You should not need a law degree to prove you made something. Drop your files in a folder. Sovereign handles the rest.
Protect demos, stems, lyrics, and masters before they leave your hard drive. Every version timestamped. Prove the song was yours before the split sheet existed.
Your work gets scraped and fed into AI models. Sovereign embeds a watermark that survives resizing, recompression, and metadata stripping, and keeps a provenance trail from first sketch to final piece.
Metadata gets stripped the moment your image hits social media. The frequency watermark lives inside the pixels — it survives resizing, recompression, and format conversion.
Manuscripts, blog drafts, scripts, research. Every save is fingerprinted. If someone publishes your work before you do, the provenance log proves you had it first.
The proof bundle is built for you. SHA3-256 fingerprint, hash-chained timeline, self-verifying script. Hand it to opposing counsel. They run one command and see the evidence.
Protect pre-release cuts, raw footage, storyboards, and scripts. Full archive mode preserves every version so you can prove the creative timeline from concept to delivery.
Every file passes through a deterministic seven-stage pipeline, entirely on your machine — from intake to a signed, exportable proof bundle.
Creator adds a digital asset — image, audio, video, document, or other file — via the vault watcher or manual import.
SHA3-256 fingerprint of the original as saved, then fingerprinted again after sealing. Dual identity is recorded.
Frequency-domain watermark and embedded authorship labels applied via atomic copy–mutate–swap, so the original is never modified in place.
Provenance event created and timestamped; the per-artifact chain and the vault-global chain are both updated.
Event signed with the creator's local Ed25519 key. The signature binds identity, time, and content together.
Creator optionally records a process declaration — process, tools, collaboration, licensing, other — with supporting evidence hash-committed, not stored.
Portable, self-verifying proof bundle created with all evidence — signed, dual-chained, and independently checkable.
Seven-Stage Protection Pipeline · Layered Evidence Model · Dual Hash-Chain Provenance · Creator Process Declarations · C2PA and AIP-7 Alignment · Alterna Axiom Labs 2026
A live vault, a creator declaration in progress, and the immutable report a proof bundle produces — every screen local, every field verifiable.
The vault dashboard — fingerprint, authorship label, provenance chain, and creator declarations for every protected file.
Recording a creator process declaration — your words, your process, hash-committed evidence.
The immutable provenance report — dual fingerprints, chain hash, vault chain head, and creator public key, ready to hand to anyone.
Redundant, cumulative authorship evidence. Each layer independently supports a claim; together they bind identity, order, authorship, and intent.
Metadata written directly inside the file — ID3 tags for audio, document properties for PDFs and Office files. Strippable by standard tools; the fingerprint is the durable evidence.
Authorship evidence in DCT coefficients — survives metadata stripping, resizing, recompression, social uploads.
Quantum-resilient SHA3-256 identity of both the pre-watermark original and the sealed artifact. Tamper-proof, independently verifiable.
Per-artifact and vault-global hash chains, bound to wall-clock, monotonic, session, and filesystem time. Backdating leaves detectable contradictions.
Ed25519 signature from a locally generated keypair — authenticated provenance, not just tamper-evident history.
Signed, hash-chained statements in the creator's own words about how a work was made, with optional hash-committed supporting evidence.
Self-contained, externally anchorable verification package for independent third-party confirmation. No app required.
Everything needed to independently verify authorship, order, and attribution. No access to the original system required.
Your original file, included for verification.
Dual SHA3-256 identity — pre-watermark original and sealed artifact.
Full dual-chain provenance record, vault chain head, creator public key, and creator declarations.
Tamper-evidence hash of the entire provenance log.
Ed25519 signature over the chain hash, from the creator's local key.
Human-readable report, including verbatim declaration pages, for legal or dispute use.
Self-verification script. Python 3, zero dependencies. Verifies both chains, the signature, and supports a reveal mode for sealed declaration evidence.
Most IP protection tools require cloud accounts, subscriptions, or blockchain wallets.
| Feature | Sovereign | ScoreDetect | Digimarc | Email / Cloud |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Works offline | ✓ Yes | ✗ Cloud required | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| No account required | ✓ Yes | ✗ Account required | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| Price | Free | Subscription | Subscription | — |
| Proof survives if company shuts down | ✓ Self-contained | ✗ Certificates die | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| Self-verifying proof | verify.py — zero deps | Requires platform | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| Frequency watermark | ✓ Survives stripping | ✗ No | ✓ Yes | ✗ No |
| Quantum-resilient hash | SHA3-256 | Standard hash | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| Hash-chained timeline | Dual-chain (per-artifact + vault-wide) | Blockchain only | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| Creator-signed proof | ✓ Local Ed25519 key | Platform account | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| Creator process declarations | ✓ Signed, hash-committed | ✗ No | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| Runs from USB | ✓ Air-gapped | ✗ No | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| Data stays on your machine | ✓ Always | Cloud + blockchain | Cloud | Third-party servers |
Sovereign is free software. Protect one lyric sheet or your entire catalog — there are no file limits, no subscription, and nothing ever leaves your machine.
Windows 10/11 (64-bit). Sovereign is independent software, so Windows may show a “protected your PC” notice on first launch — click More info, then Run anyway.
Sovereign fingerprints every file with SHA3-256 — once before watermarking, once after — embeds a frequency-domain watermark that survives resizing, recompression, and metadata stripping, logs every event in two interleaved hash chains, signs the record with a local Ed25519 key, and exports a proof bundle anyone can verify by running one Python script.
No. Everything runs on your machine, including creator signing. Sovereign works air-gapped from a USB stick on any Windows machine. No cloud, no account, no login. An optional anchor card lets you publish your vault's chain head externally by your own choice — Sovereign itself never makes that connection.
A ZIP file containing your original file, its dual SHA3-256 fingerprints, the full dual-chain provenance record, an Ed25519 signature, a human-readable PDF report, a tamper-evidence hash, and a self-verification script. Hand it to a lawyer or opposing counsel — they run one command and see the evidence.
An optional, signed statement in your own words about how a work was made — process, tools, collaboration, licensing, or anything else. Sovereign records that the statement was made, when, and by which key. It never judges whether the statement is true.
Images (JPG, PNG, TIFF, WebP), audio (WAV, MP3, FLAC, M4A), video (MP4, MOV), documents (PDF, DOCX, TXT, MD), and more. Each format gets appropriate watermarking — frequency-domain for images, ID3 for audio, container metadata for video, sidecar files for everything else.
Nothing. Sovereign is free software with no file limits, no subscription, and no account. Your proof never expires, and nothing you make ever leaves your machine.
SHA3-256 uses the Keccak sponge construction, which is structurally different from SHA-256 and provides stronger resistance against future quantum computing attacks. Your proof needs to hold up years from now — SHA3-256 ensures it will.
The Sovereign architecture is fully documented through defensive publications on public record.
Full defensive publication establishing prior art for the complete Sovereign architecture. Dual SHA3-256 fingerprinting, dual hash-chain provenance, clock-anomaly detection, local Ed25519 creator signing, external anchoring, creator process declarations, frequency-domain watermarking, C2PA and AIP-7 alignment.
DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19056811 → Defensive Concept Note · Addendum · ZenodoPrior art documentation for a provenance-aware digital audio workstation where music creation actions automatically generate cryptographic authorship events. Song projects as protected creative containers.
Zenodo DOI →