ISO/IEC 4922-3 Standard on Garbled‑Circuit Based Secure Multiparty Computation Approved, Ant Technology Institute Contributes

ISO International Standard Approved

Ant Technology Institute Participates in Drafting

Ant Group, together with Alibaba, the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other organizations, successfully pushed ISO/IEC 4922-3 (Information security – Secure multiparty computation – Part 3: Mechanisms based on garbled circuit) through the ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC27 voting process. The standard received strong support and nominations from experts in eight countries, including China, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Ireland and Austria.

ISO/IEC JTC1 SC27 Introduction

ISO/IEC JTC1 SC27 is the sub‑committee for information security, network security and privacy protection. Its standards have global influence; the well‑known ISO/IEC 27000 series originates from this body. Since 2019 SC27 has been developing standards for secure multiparty computation, resulting in the ISO/IEC 4922 series. Part 1 (general principles) and Part 2 (secret‑sharing mechanisms) have already been published, and Part 3 focuses on garbled‑circuit based mechanisms. Experts from Ant Technology Institute, Ant Group’s standardization team and AntChain MOS team have taken leading roles in researching, drafting and editing this standard.

Garbled‑Circuit Based Secure Multiparty Computation Mechanism

Garbled circuits, proposed by renowned Chinese computer scientist Prof. Yao in 1986 to solve the two‑party secure computation problem, compile the function to be computed into a Boolean circuit, encrypt the truth tables of the gates and randomize their order. This allows the parties to evaluate the function without revealing their inputs or intermediate results. Because any computation can be expressed as a Boolean circuit and the protocol requires only a constant number of communication rounds, garbled circuits are widely applicable to multiparty secure computation and constitute a fundamental cryptographic building block. Standardizing the technical implementation of garbled circuits promotes consensus, builds trust, and guides industry in using them for privacy‑preserving data collaboration.

Ant Technology Institute’s Deep Involvement in Privacy Computing

As a major driver of this standard, Ant Technology Institute has long emphasized the development and innovation of privacy‑computing technologies. Its research has been selected for top conferences such as USENIX Security and Asiacrypt. In August 2023, the institute co‑launched the first “software‑hardware co‑design” fund with CCF, targeting key breakthroughs in privacy computing. By September, it collaborated with Zhejiang University’s School of Cyberspace Security to release a white paper on privacy‑preserving large‑model inference, providing technical roadmaps and theoretical data to support practical deployment of privacy‑secure large models.

One of the principal editors of ISO/IEC 4922‑3, Ant Technology Institute cryptography researcher Huang Zhicong, stated: “The approval of this standard is significant for advancing research and practical deployment of garbled circuits and secure computation. Ant Technology Institute will continue to deepen its work in this field, delivering research outcomes as standardized and productized solutions to the industry.”