IEEE Approves First TEE-Based Secure Computing Standard Led by Ant Group

Ant Group has led the IEEE to approve the "TEE-based Secure Computing" international standard, the first IEEE standard that implements secure computing using Trusted Execution Environments. The standard defines the overall framework, functional description, technical and security requirements, aiming to protect data privacy and prevent exposure or misuse of sensitive code during data value extraction.

IEEE is currently the world’s largest nonprofit professional technical society and one of the largest professional technical associations globally, with its standards recognized worldwide, such as the well‑known IEEE 802 series.

TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) technology leverages chip‑provided secure enclaves, allowing applications to be protected from threats originating from other applications, operating systems, or other tenants. TEE‑based secure computing builds secure‑computing solutions using this technology, with numerous application scenarios in cloud computing, blockchain, AI, and trusted data fusion.

As data security and privacy protection gain increasing attention, TEE has become a widely endorsed technical solution, and many cloud providers are promoting TEE‑related technologies and secure‑computing products. Ant Group has long invested in data and privacy protection, early exploring and practicing TEE‑based secure computing, and has built the complete SOFAEnclave technology stack. In early 2019 Ant Group open‑sourced the Occlum Enclave LibOS, now the only Chinese project under the Confidential Computing Consortium (Linux Foundation), adopted by projects such as Inclavare Containers and Hyperledger Avalon. Ant also became a Premier Member of CCC. In 2020, at the first Bund Conference, Ant announced the open‑source KubeTEE, a Kubernetes‑based TEE cluster solution, providing experience for scaling and productizing TEE, and also introduced HyperEnclave, a virtualization‑based TEE practice solution.

Ant Group continuously applies TEE‑based security technologies across multiple business scenarios, actively participates in related standard‑setting, and most of its solutions have passed authoritative evaluations. Its Ant Shared Intelligence Platform, based on TEE and secure multi‑party computation, enables data to be usable yet invisible, serving joint risk control and intelligent marketing, and has won awards such as the CCF Technology Progress Award. The AntChain Moses Secure Computing Platform combines multi‑party computation and TEE, integrating blockchain, zero‑knowledge proofs, and differential privacy to address data island privacy, consensus, and trust challenges, meeting diverse security and performance requirements, and won the IDASH privacy‑computing competition. AntChain deeply integrates TEE with blockchain, proposing an on‑chain privacy‑preserving computation model that solves the full‑life‑cycle privacy protection problem; related papers were selected for top conferences like ACM SIGMOD 2020. AntChain also developed dedicated hardware for blockchain smart contracts with its own root of trust, and a off‑chain privacy‑computing platform built on TEE that extends blockchain privacy and data processing capabilities, bringing big data and machine learning into the blockchain ecosystem, now deployed at scale in digital logistics and financial risk control.

The IEEE standard approval validates Ant Group’s technical capabilities in data security and privacy. While TEE‑based secure computing and other secure‑computing technologies are still in early stages, Ant Group hopes the standard will promote a collaborative ecosystem for secure computing worldwide and welcomes cooperation from interested organizations.