Hangzhou, China: Ant Group said its privacy-preserving computation framework is now Open source.
The Group has turned its internal framework called SecretFlow into Open source, making it more accessible to global developers and speeding up the framework’s application in various scenarios.
SecretFlow is a unified framework for privacy-preserving data intelligence and machine learning. The framework addresses pain points in multi-party collaboration on information flows.
It integrates a range of Ant Group’s privacy computing technologies and covers the whole 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,” said Lei Wang, GM – Privacy Computing Department, Ant Group.
“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 Wang.
Ant Group and the China Computer Federation also officially launched the CCF-Ant Group Privacy Computing Special Fund today.
The fund will initially invest over US$ 600,000 to support cutting-edge research in the fields of privacy computing, such as Post-Quantum Multi-Party Computation, Security of Open Source Privacy Computing Platform and others. The Fund is available to researchers worldwide now.
“Ant is willing to share our resources and innovations with other industry players and explore the value of privacy computing technologies together,” said Tao Wei, VP and CISO – Ant Group.
The demand for privacy-preserving computation continues to grow as the world becomes increasingly digital. Gartner predicts that 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 exploring technological innovation in privacy-preserving computation. In 2022, the Group tops the list of patent applications for privacy-preserving computation technologies, with 1,152 patent applications.
Ant Group’s privacy-preserving computation framework is available as an open-source on GitHub