Author: LatticeX Foundation

Since the Privacy-preserving Computation was introduced in 2016, after five years of development, data elements have increasingly become the primary energy driving economic development, promoted by laws and regulations on data privacy protection in different countries, and by the growing degree of digitization of human societies caused by global outbreaks, which makes privacy-preserving computation become the most fundamental and important underlying technology in information technology.

Privacy-preserving computation is a computable model and axiomatic system of privacy measurement, privacy leakage cost, privacy protection and privacy analysis complexity when the ownership, management and use of privacy information are separated. Privacy-preserving computation allows data or computing methods to be “encrypted” without being leaked to other partners for computing cooperation.

How is this way of allowing data to be encrypted for computing to bring value into play is changing and also will completely change the way the Internet and even human society work?

Part.1 Plaintext data to ciphertext data

As the basic component of information network, the data records all the information and track of human production and life in a digital state faithfully, and a great deal of value is excavated, to constantly improve and even transform human life under the wide application of the new technology such as cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and so on.

Relying on data to generate value is the fundamental business model of Internet giants, and the premise is the collection of user information. In essence, user information data is an important part of the user’s personal rights. The privacy right of user’s personal data has been paid more and more attention, which is protected by law in every country.

Therefore, the problem of data security, which has been widely concerned, has been changing from traditional fields such as hacker prevention, anti-disaster backup and data recovery to focusing on how to protect users’ privacy while excavating data value.

In the present, data is shared and used in plaintext in almost all application scenarios. Because data is digital rather than physical, and there is no exclusive feature, “what you see is what you get” makes the “use” and “possession” of data virtually indistinguishable.

This form of plaintext data storage actually results in a natural conflict between data sharing and privacy protection. Even in the mode of republishing after removing sensitive information, user identity can be identified by means of quasi-identifier recognition.

The existence of this contradiction is a major obstacle to the current development of industries with a large demand for data applications. In the AI industry, for example, it takes massive amounts of data to feed and train AI to become smarter, but the amount of data that can be used in a compliant way is very lacking due to the strict requirements of data privacy protection.
Privacy-preserving Computation provides a perfect solution to this contradiction.

The privacy-preserving Computation let the data circulate and share in the ciphertext state and use to calculate and let the data “use” and “own” these two states completely separate, so that the data is “invisible but available”, and the data privacy can be completely protected, but the value of the data can still play.

Therefore, it can be predicted that when privacy-preserving Computation technology becomes the future of underlying information technology, data that remains in every corner of society unless authorized by the data owner, will be shared and used in a completely unreadable ciphertext state, thus fundamentally solving the problem of data privacy protection.

Continued from next article.Part.2:

Click to read: Information Network to Computing Network

About the LatticeX Foundation
The Singapore Lattice Foundation with the vision of returning data sovereignty to users, protecting data privacy and realizing data value exchange through complex computing, aims to build a fully decentralized computing interoperability network to promote transactions of data use rights while protecting data sovereignty and privacy. In order to realize LatticeX vision, it also provides all kinds of academic research, cultivates and manages all kinds of applications and provides financial support for high-quality projects. The LatticeX Foundation is a major supporter and promoter of the distributed privacy AI network PlatON and the financial network Alaya.