From Plaintext to Data‑in‑Encryption: The Emerging Era of Data “密态” and Trusted Privacy Computing

As the digital economy expands, data has become a critical production factor, but massive data generation also exposes severe security risks such as leakage and unauthorized use.

Following the enactment of China’s Data Security Law and Personal Information Protection Law, the government has introduced policies that require clear data ownership, processing, and product rights, prompting a transition away from plaintext data sharing.

In an interview, Dr. Wei Tao, Vice President and Chief Security Officer of Ant Group, explains that keeping data encrypted throughout its entire lifecycle— from collection, sharing, computation to destruction— is essential to prevent uncontrolled leakage and to protect the value of data assets. This state is termed “data 密态”.

Trusted privacy computing is highlighted as the most promising technical route to achieve data 密态, with Gartner predicting that 50% of enterprises will adopt privacy‑computing technologies by 2025.

Challenges remain, including balancing security, cost, and efficiency, as well as establishing standards for evaluating the security levels of various privacy‑computing techniques.

Ant Group’s research has produced the Trusted‑Environment‑based Cryptographic Computing (TECC) framework, which integrates MPC, federated learning, homomorphic encryption, and trusted execution environments to enable large‑scale, high‑performance encrypted computation.

Regulatory pressure and market demand are driving commercial adoption; Ant Group has launched products such as MORSE (a multi‑party secure computation platform) and FAIR (a privacy‑computing and blockchain‑integrated platform), serving finance, research, government, healthcare, and industrial sectors.

The article also discusses the “East‑Data‑West‑Compute” national initiative, illustrating how TECC can securely move encrypted data to western data centers while preserving privacy and leveraging regional compute resources.

Future outlook suggests that the data 密态 market could become a trillion‑yuan industry, with three stages— computation‑密态, big‑data‑密态, and data‑element‑密态— each demanding higher performance, reliability, and cost‑effectiveness.

Ant Group positions itself as a builder and promoter of the data 密态 ecosystem, contributing open‑source tools, standards, and talent development to accelerate industry‑wide adoption.