Trade secret inventories

Identifies inventories and registers of trade-secret assets — register, inventory-entry, and asset-record structures as well as the topic label — in security and access control contexts. Detects potential exposure of sensitive security information in Australian systems.

Type

regex

Engine

boost_regex

Confidence

low

Confidence justification

Low confidence marker: phrase-based artifact detection to bootstrap line-by-line coverage. Requires corroborative evidence and later hardening to high-confidence structural patterns.

Detection quality

Topic verified

Jurisdictions

global

Regulations

NDB Scheme (Cth), SOCI Act 2018 (Cth), TIA Act 1979 (Cth), GDPR

Frameworks

CIS Controls, DISP, ISO 27001, NIST CSF, PCI-DSS, SOC 2

Data categories

intellectual-property, business

Scope

wide

Risk rating

8

Platform compatibility

Purview: Compatible, GCP DLP: Compatible, Macie: Compatible, Zscaler: Compatible, Palo Alto: Degraded, Netskope: Unsupported

Pattern

(?i)\b(?:trade\s+secret|secret\s+asset)\s+(?:inventory|inventories|register|catalog(?:ue)?|asset\s+record|entry)\b

Corroborative evidence keywords

trade secret inventories, trade, secret, inventories, intellectual, property, secrets, OFFICIAL, OFFICIAL:Sensitive, PROTECTED, SECRET, TOP SECRET, CABINET-IN-CONFIDENCE, NOFORN, REL TO, ORCON, National Cabinet, AUSTEO, [object Object], Sensitive: Legal (+24 more)

Proximity: 300 characters

Should match

• Trade secret inventories — Topic phrase present
• trade secret inventories — Topic phrase, lowercase
• this record references the trade secret inventories held on file — Topic phrase within surrounding text
• TRADE SECRET REGISTER Asset ID TS-88 Owner: Process Engineering Repository: Vault-3 Review date: 2027-01-15 — Case-insensitive register anchor with populated inventory fields (enforces at 75/85)

Should not match

• unrelated generic text — No relevant phrase context
• placeholder value 12345 — Random text should not match phrase marker
• Our policy requires teams to maintain a trade secret register. — Policy mandating a register has no populated fields — discovery only, must not enforce
• The museum inventory lists nineteenth-century trade tools. — Inventory and trade outside intellectual-property meaning must not match
• Sample trade secret register template - Owner: placeholder — Sample/template/placeholder terms mark an unpopulated form — suppressed from enforcement
• Trade secret inventories — Title alone is a topic signal only — discovery only, must not enforce

Known false positives

• Authentication-related terminology in software documentation, security training materials, or system architecture descriptions without actual credentials. Mitigation: Require proximity to credential-specific patterns (API keys, connection strings, tokens) rather than general security terminology.
• Code snippets and configuration examples containing credential-related keywords or placeholder values in developer documentation. Mitigation: Check for common placeholder patterns (example.com, localhost, 0000) and documentation file types to reduce false positives from technical writing.

References

• https://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/tools-and-research/business-resources/non-disclosure-agreements
• https://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/patents/how-to-apply-for-a-standard-patent/what-to-consider-before-applying-for-a-patent