Ant Group announced today that its privacy-preserving Computation Framework (or “Framework”) has gone open source, with the goal of making the technologies more accessible to global developers and speeding up the Framework’s application in various scenarios. The Framework is intended to address issues that arise during multi-party collaboration on information flows. It incorporates a number of industry-leading privacy computing technologies from Ant Group and covers the entire information life cycle, including Secure Multi-Party Computation, Differential Privacy, Homomorphic Encryption, and others.
“It is costly for developers to start from scratch as there are many fundamental technologies involved in the privacy-preserving computing process. Now, with Ant’s open-source framework, developers can build their solutions and projects by using our fundamental technologies as the building blocks, which can further their research with a more simplified process and lower costs,” said Lei Wang, General Manager of the Privacy Computing Department of Ant Group.
The “CCF-Ant Group Privacy Computing Special Fund” (or the “Fund”) was also officially launched today by Ant Group and the China Computer Federation. The Fund will initially invest over $600,000 in cutting-edge research in privacy computing fields such as Post-Quantum Multi-Party Computation, Security of Open Source Privacy Computing Platform, and others. The Fund is now available to researchers all over the world.
“Ant is willing to share our resources and innovations with other industry players and explore the value of privacy computing technologies together,” says Tao Wei, Vice President and the Chief Information Security Officer at Ant Group.
As the world becomes more digital, the demand for privacy-preserving computation grows. According to Gartner, by 2025, 60% of large organisations will use at least one Privacy-Enhancing Computation technique in analytics, business intelligence, and/or cloud computing. Ant Group has always been interested in technological innovation in the field of privacy-preserving computation. With 1,152 patent applications in 2022, Ant Group leads the list of patent applications for privacy-preserving computation technologies.
