The present application is directed to establishing ownership of a secure workspace (SW). A client device may provide a SW data structure (SWDS) to a SW configurator. A SWDS may comprise a hash of an original SW and a public key, and may be signed by a private key corresponding to the public key. The SW configurator may cause an execution container (EC) to be generated including a SW initiated using the SWDS. The client device may claim SW ownership using a request (signed by the private key) transmitted along with a copy of the public key. SW ownership may be determined by an ownership determination module that verifies the signature of the request using the public key received with the request, determines a hash of the received public key and compares the hash of the received public key to a hash of the public key in the SWDS.