Ant Group Launches Cybersecurity Student Innovation Funding Program to Foster Industry‑Academia Collaboration

Cybersecurity impacts economic development, daily life, and social stability. Guided by the Central Cyberspace Administration in 2022, Ant Group together with TianRongXin, QiAnXin, NIO, the China Cyberspace Security Association, the China Internet Development Foundation, and top cybersecurity schools initiated the Cybersecurity Academy Student Innovation Funding Program, a five‑year initiative to sponsor 1,200 students for innovative research.

According to Ant Group Vice President and Chief Technology Security Officer Wei Tao, the Ant Security Technology team selected five open‑source security foundations and application platforms—"Secure Parallel Aspect", "Occlum Trusted Execution Environment Library OS", "OceanBase Distributed Database", "YinYu Trusted Privacy Computing Framework", and "UAST Unified Program Security Analysis Platform"—and invited students to directly engage in frontline industry research.

The projects officially started in October 2022. To ensure steady progress, Ant Group established a phased reporting mechanism, regularly organizing corporate mentors to guide and evaluate students' interim results. After three months, the first‑phase reporting was completed successfully, with 96.6% of students achieving grades of A or higher.

Zhao Haodong, a funded student from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, described the experience as invaluable, noting that the topic "Split‑Learning Attack‑Defense" closely relates to the security of split‑learning and edge‑cloud collaborative technologies, offering strong practical relevance and complementing his campus research.

Chen Tianyang from Huazhong University of Science and Technology highlighted the practical application details, emphasizing that when deploying cryptographic algorithms, performance metrics such as computational and network overhead—often with network cost dominating—provide crucial guidance for his own research direction.

As a platform for industry‑academia integration in cybersecurity, the funding program promotes the cultivation of innovative security talent and the convergence of cybersecurity education, technology, and industry. Ant Group will continue to strengthen support for each direction by assigning senior technical personnel and research teams to ensure professional, targeted, and sustained research outcomes that bring cutting‑edge security technologies into universities.