For Good Measure: Patent Activity as a Measure of Cybersecurity Innovation

Type “cybersecurity” into Google Patents, sort by oldest and then newest, and take the top 100 in each list. Keeping in mind that the lists include applications as well as grants, Table 1 lists the number of entries by country in the respective lists.

The top three assignees in the oldest list were AT&T/Bell Labs, Computer Security Corporation, and Westinghouse Electric in that order. The top three assignees in the newest list were two Chinese companies, and then IBM.

But what, you might ask, does this have to do with computer security metrics?