Ant Group open sources privacy software

The framework is designed to preserve user privacy while the firm carries out data analysis and machine learning and address pain points in multiparty 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, and homomorphic encryption.

Ant has made the framework, called SecretFlow, available on GitHub and Chinese alternative Gitee in a move designed to make it accessible to global developers and “speed up the its application in various scenarios”.

Lei Wang, GM, privacy computing department, Ant, says: “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.”

Meanwhile Ant has joined forces with the China Computer Federation to launch a privacy computing fund, with an initial S$600,000 pot to support research in areas such as post-quantum multi-party computation.